How the Light Gets in: Change and Continuity

Abstract

Poets, philosophers, novelists and social scientists have long wondered about the question of change, seeing it as one of the most perplexing and enigmatic features of our world. As a result, we see a mountain of thinking, writing and other forms of creative expression far too high to scale in a short book.¹ Yet at least one aspect of that question was grasped early in the historical archive. Sometime in the seventh and the eighth century BCE, Homer stepped back from his full and frank story of war in his Iliad, to meditate on the ceaseless cycle of birth and death and the comings and goings of all those who are brought into life and who must die:

A generation [genea] of men is like a generation of leaves: the wind scatters some leaves upon the ground, while others the burgeoning wood brings forth — and the season of spring comes on.