Metamorphoses

. . . what we were
and what we are today is not to be
tomorrow . . .

There is no thing that keeps its shape; for nature,
the innovator, would forever draw
forms out of other forms. In all this world---
you can believe me---no thing ever dies.
By birth we mean beginning to re-form,
a thing's becoming other than it was;
and death is but the end of the old state;
one thing shifts here, another there; and yet
the total of all things is permanent.


Ovid, Metamorphoses, book XV
trans. Allen Mandelbaum