Impermanence

          Still ruminating over my recent theme of impermanence--which is autumn's wise insight--I came across these lines recently in The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck.  By modern standards, Buck's masterpiece novel is a little tendentious.  It plays the chords of "forgetfulness," "acquisitiveness," and "connection to the earth" over and over.  But despite that lack of refinement, the book shows a great understanding of human psychology and desire.  I first read it when I was ten, and it's still one of the few novels I consider worth rereading every two decades or so.  It's essentially a parable about happiness, set in China in the early 20th century.  Early on, Buck describes a peasant farmer working his land.  His faithful but simple-minded and unattractive wife is working by his side:

          "He had no articulate thought of anything; there was only this perfect sympathy of movement, of turning this earth of theirs over to the sun, this earth which formed their home and fed their bodies and made their [clay] gods.  The earth lay rich and dark, and fell apart lightly under the points of their hoes.  Sometimes they turned up a bit of brick, a splinter of wood.  It was nothing.  Some time, in some age, bodies of men and women had been buried there, houses had stood there, had fallen, and gone back into the earth.  So would also their house, some time, return into the earth, their bodies also.  Each had his turn at this earth..."