@ideas
Itap of
Earling: Charlie, why do clouds come and go like unkept thoughts?
Charlie: Because permanence is the lie Earthlings tell to survive. Even your mountains envy the cloud’s briefness.
Earling: I watched one vanish behind the sun today. It felt like a life disappearing.
Charlie: Maybe it was. Heraclitus said no one steps into the same river twice; you can’t even look at the same cloud twice.
Earling: Then all we love dissolves?
Charlie: Rilke warned, “Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.” Clouds are that — birth and disappearance, inseparable.
Earling: So to live is to rise, evaporate, and fall again?
Charlie: Exactly. To be a cloud with memory — light enough to drift, heavy enough to rain.