Literary notes about flux (AI summary)
The term "flux" serves as a versatile literary motif, embodying both literal change and metaphorical transformation. In some works it underscores the ceaseless, natural cycle of variation and instability in nature and human experience, as when life is portrayed as an unremitting river of change ([1],[2],[3]), or when intellectual and emotional states are described as being in constant motion ([4],[5]). At the same time, the word appears in medical contexts to denote conditions marked by the uncontrolled flow of bodily fluids, evoking both physical suffering and the fragility of human existence ([6],[7],[8]). Its use often blurs the line between the tangible and the abstract—whether symbolizing the rhythmic ebb and flow of tides ([9],[10]) or representing the broader, often tumultuous evolution of ideas and society ([11],[12])—thus reflecting the multiplicity of its meanings in literature.
- The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.
— from The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 03 of 12) by James George Frazer - Flux and change are constantly renewing the world, just as the unbroken flow of time ever presents to us some new portion of eternity.
— from The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus by Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius - Things of this world are in so constant a flux, that nothing remains long in the same state.
— from Second Treatise of Government by John Locke - Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired.
— from Samuel Johnson by Leslie Stephen - The sense of flux which had haunted her all the year disappeared for a time.
— from Howards End by E. M. Forster - By the Christians, this group was foolishly explained of their founder and the poor woman whom he had cured of the bloody flux, (Euseb.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon - Wafers put in water, and drank, stays the lask and bloody flux, and are profitably used both inwardly and outwardly for the ruptures in children.
— from The Complete Herbal by Nicholas Culpeper - After being detained upwards of two years in prison, Dr. Constantine was seized with a bloody flux, which put an end to his miseries in this world.
— from Fox's Book of Martyrs by John Foxe - This stream is regulated by the flux and reflux of the sea—it being constantly high and low water every six hours.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition by Edgar Allan Poe - Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things?
— from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson - It will be a new sort of constant illustrated in the flux; and this we call a law.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana - Oh, where is there deliverance from the flux of things and from the ‘existence’ of penalty?”
— from Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
