All things change
I know the Change CTCW is over, but I just tripped over this great quote from Ovid.
It’s quoted in a book I’m reading Houseof Darkness, House of Light, by Andrea Perron, a memoir of the ten years her family lived in a haunted house. At one point her mother quoted this to her:
“All things are always changing,
But nothing dies. The spirit comes and goes,
Is housed wherever it wills, shifts residence
From beasts to men, from men to beasts, but always
It keeps on living. As the pliant wax
Is stamped with new designs, and is no longer
What once it was, but changes form, and still
Is pliant wax, so do I teach that spirit
Is evermore the same, though passing always
To ever-changing bodies.”
A web search revealed this is from his Metamorphasis (book 15, lines 59-477) The Teachings of Pythagoras.
It speaks to me of how the changes we see may confuse us into thinking that what changed is different than what we think changed. Ovid (or Pythagoras) warns not to kill someone because we don’t know why his soul is in this state at present. Of course, in the book they are talking about ghosts and dealing with them. The book is so much slower paced than movies made about the incident, which makes sense since in a haunting you have sporadic incidents over a long time, and in a movie, they take the most dramatic and stuff them into a hundred minutes. If you are interested and willing to read through the development of family dynamics while living with a difficult haunting, not looking for the easy answers and jump scares, I can recommend this book. At very least, it begins and ends each chapter with wonderful quotes.
The version I found an image for is rather different,but also good.