'chafing against the ultimate Fate'

Margaret had often wondered at the disturbance that takes place in the world's waters, when Love, who seems so tiny a pebble, slips in. Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact deluges a hundred shores. No doubt the disturbance is really the spirit of the generations, welcoming the new generation, and chafing against the ultimate Fate, who holds all the seas in the palm of her hand. But Love cannot understand this. He cannot comprehend another's infinity; he is conscious only of his own—flying sunbeam, falling rose, pebble that asks for one quiet plunge below the fretting interplay of space and time. He knows that he will survive at the end of things, and be gathered by Fate as a jewel from the slime, and be handed with admiration round the assembly of the gods. "Men did produce this," they will say, and, saying, they will give men immortality. But meanwhile—what agitations meanwhile!

—E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910)

'the glad hand of national industry'

The homecoming itself was awash in vague remembered detail; the steamer dock on Sugar Island looked draped in rain. He remembered that. It was a wet, middling season in Michigan; he forgot which one. There were a number of them. And this: the condemned freighter Maida towed by tugs toward a chalky wafer of sun, toward the lead-white expanse of Detroit River, black gleaming derricks, slag—the whole, lurid panorama of cloacal American nature smarm debouching into Lake Erie where—when Payne was duck hunting—a turn of his oar against the bottom brought up a blue whirring nimbus of petroleum sludge and toxic, coagulant effluents the glad hand of national industry wants the kids to swim in. This was water that ran in veins. This was proud water that wouldn't mix. This was water whose currents drove the additives aloft in glossy pools and gay poison rainbows. This was water the walking upon of which scarcely made for a miracle.

—Thomas McGuane, The Bushwacked Piano (1971)

'What in water did Bloom ... admire?'

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

—James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

This Rhythm of What Passes Away

The final note is, at first hearing, the rhythm of what is passing away. To be sure, the creaturely is a "cascading torrent" ("a torrent...is gathered, overflows, thunders, runs and in running runs off," [Augustine]); indeed, one could even say that it only "was" or "will be," but never "is" ("before they might be they are not, and when they are they are fleeing away, and when they have fled they no longer are," [Augusgtine]). But it is just this "passing away" that gives the "whole" its particular resonance: just as a spoken work of art depends upon each verse, each syllable, each letter "passing away."...The only appropriate posture, then, is that of "flowing with what flows" to the point of an ever more rapid "trickling away."

But the final clarification of this "rhythm of what passes away" is based in this: that this rhythm is, more profoundly, a manifestation of the mystery of God: the God who works through and sustains this rhythm in its entirety; the God who hereby joins its "nothingness" to an "is"...

—Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis (1932)