The falling apart. The breaking down. The return to elements. Out of the realm of recognition to simply matter. And then to not matter at all.

Everywhere, there is a slow constancy of decay. Decay is what happens when time throws itself in full gale against matter. Against nature.   There are many meanings to the word “nature.” I prefer Ralph Waldo Emerson’s definition that nature is all which is apart from us humans.

We exist in time and space. We try to regain what we lack in space in time—stretching our body’s elasticity. Death happens when matter fails to keep pace with time.   Is the modern world fighting a memory of death we do not have? Did we all agree on this one fact: We will allow every single person the means to live as long as possible? Has it always been thus?

But stretch as we try, even our time dimension is minuscule compared to tortoises’. To trees’. To oceans’. To stars’.

Notwithstanding tortoises, in the end, all of these—all of us—entangle with decay. And we lose.

That impulse to withstand decay is—at its extreme—one of the creepiest aspects of humanity. It’s the impulse to embalm Lenin. Literally. Vladimir Lenin has avoided decay since he died in 1924. An embalming process that renders the former leader a waxen figure with the appearance of one who has been honey-glazed. I saw him fifteen years ago. Lenin is still honey-glazed in Moscow, and I’ve most certainly begun to decay. Is there comfort in Lenin still being Lenin? (Is Lenin still Lenin?)

Decay is so horrible. We revel in its absence and revile its presence. Change is the enemy.

There is a curiosity in Guanajuato, Mexico, where wrappings and clay soil have oddly preserved the bodies buried after an 1833 cholera outbreak. Now, they are oddly preserved in a museum. I saw them twenty years ago. They are still there, having changed less than I have. Is there comfort in their consistency?

Not unlike the peoples of Pompeii, who were covered instantly with ash and entombed in 79 AD. I saw these remnants maybe ten years ago at the Boston Museum of Science with my mother.

Neither of us was sure we were supposed to be proud, transgressed, empathetic, or merely in awe of science. Both of us have changed immensely since then. I fear her decay outpaces my own. At a certain age, it happens. I suspect the Pompeiians have not changed.

We think we avoid decay. But there is no such thing. We’ve just pushed it out of our lifespan. (And beyond for those who opt for cremation.)

As I write, we are closing out the hottest year ever recorded in the United Kingdom. Things are breaking down. The air is cloyingly thick and fecund with rampant atoms and elements. Things returning from whence they came. Time is ravaging everything. Will Nature surrender?

Almost a century ago, American-born British poet T.S. Eliot witnessed and lamented a similar feeling:

I sat on the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
From T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

Eliot wrote this most famous poem in the hollowed aftermath of his failed first marriage and the First World War. In this mindset, he held “fear in a handful of dust.” What would he have written today?

Although today's heat is novel, the decay is not in Britain. The disintegration of the once-great British Empire has been a headline feature of the 20th century. A political scientist friend recently confessed that all this country has going for is nostalgia.   Nostalgia is another word for “memory of the finest parts of the past held, and projected generously, by the people whom the past best served.” It might be true that Britain is stunted, wicked, turning inward, and choking. Still, I don’t want to live in a world without Britain.

George Mike’s humorous, truthful, and timeless guide to understanding one’s adopted country (in this case, Britain) has a fascinating chapter on the British penchant for decline.

The greatest days of Rome were its days of decline: The most splendid period of the Bourbon monarchy was the period before the Revolution. It is more elegant wise and stylish to decay than to flourish; better to decline than to pant, rush around, sweat and get hoarse in vulgar bargaining.
From George Mike’s How to Be a Brit

Mikes was a Hungarian immigrant to Britain who, like all of us immigrants, adapted to the country as best he could and then supposed it appropriate to reflect on the British using their own humor against them. Mikes achieved this better than most, so this 1946 book is still in print.

I agree with the British about this; I too prefer constructive decay to futile progress. But one must know how to decay and learn how to be decadent. You must desire to decay, yet your inborn excellence, splendid human qualities, and shining character may keep you on the top. Or else, you might overdo it and decay a shade too speedily.

Look carefully: Britain shows us how to decay. Keep calm and carry on (decaying).

The world, the universe, and every single thing we know and don’t know would not work without decay. Its agents (worms and bacteria), its byproducts (cheese and dirt), its sufferers (the entire human race), our beloved pets, empires, old oak timbers, and, with an exceedingly enormous allowance of time, our ever-constant stars.

As Nature tries her best to specialize and grow things piece by piece, to make trees, stars, coral, a human brain (and then those specializations aggregate to make other specializations—we make forests, empires, reefs), Time shakes its head. “I will allow you, Nature, some coral, and the human brain, but only for so long. This is not the state of things.” “What about the stars?” responds Nature. “In the stars, you have put your very soul,” answers Time. “They can last longer.”

Sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, known for his great (permanent) wall, cairn, and arch installations, also makes up to two “ephemeral works” daily.

These works are made for a particular place and may last anything from a few minutes to a few days. They are an exploration of the land, often made without knowing what the result will be. They are intuitive responses to light, material, time, and weather. They need to make mistakes, and sometimes to produce bad works is part of the process. I have far more failures than successes.
From Andy Goldworthy’s Wall

Wetting leaves on river stones, threading grass through branches, standing ice sheets on end—all ephemeral works. The sharpened teeth of decay waiting in the wings to tear apart this human invention. But its brief existence meant something. Goldsworthy simply makes more, better.

Nature does the same. More complexity, more ingenuity each time, fed with the decay of the old. She has learned how to use decay as part of the process.

Albeit tyrannical, decay isn’t greedy. It isn’t deceitful. Nothing is present that isn’t needed, and nothing is needed that isn’t present. It is the most tidy of henchmen. It is elegant. To push against it is inelegant.

It is, moreover, its own reward. A beauteous simplicity, suggests philosopher Hannah Arendt:

Although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living.
From Hannah Arendt’s “Introduction” to Illuminations

Our contemplation of decay is complex because it is a contemplation of mortality. You cannot always exist, but you will always have existed.

I would hitch up these fragments against my ruins, hold them fast. I would find myself in a forest, under an oak, pressed into coal. Waiting for that drill bit. My self into atoms, and those atoms were released into fires and furnaces, then somehow cleaned into the air and part of all things.

If you change your notion of being, you will always be. Decay is elegance. There is comfort in that. Much more so than a glazed, petrified Lenin.