''The tree is something new at every moment''

You see the freshness of flowers, or the freshness of fruit, and hour after hour, day after day, you observe the loss of this freshness. There is a degradation of their matter. But this loss of freshness is an illusion, it is not absolute, it is relative to your needs, to your senses. You call fresh what is healthy, you deny this quality of freshness to what is not. Degradation is a negative alteration, but this negativity is in your eye, in your senses, not in the things. Reality is an incessant renewing. Matter changes at every moment, alters itself incessantly, and so is always new, always fresh. The tree, wrote Nietzsche, is something new at every moment : the form is maintained by us, because we cannot perceive the finest absolute motion.

We add : every material thing is something new at every moment : water and stone, wood and grass, gold and gorse, animal and human bodies, sky and clouds, air and sun. This is why nature always gives you an impression of freshness.