Mayflies In a Fortress

A hive of mayflies came down upon a fortress and settled on the bastions, took the main tower by a surprise coup, occupied the battlements and the towers. The delicately veined, transparent wings buzzed between the stone walls. "In vain you are trying to stretch your filligrane limbs", the fortress said, "Only who is made to last can claim to be. I'm lasting therefore I am, you're not." - "We live in the air space, we chant time with the vibration of our wings. Whatelse is the meaning of being?", the delicate creatures responded. "You are rather only a shape, placed to mark the boundaries of space and time, in which we are." - "Time passes me, I remain.", the fortress insisted. "You are just the surface of becoming, like the surface of the water of a stream." Whereupon the flies: "We flit through the void like writing across a white paper, like the sound of a flute in the silence. Without us only the all-powerful and all-present void would remain, which is so heavy that it crushes the world, the void, whose detructive power covers itself with fortresses, a massive void, that can only be resolved by the slight and the quick and the delicate." - Italo Calvino