A Definition of Fleeting

“O nature, merciful and cruel mother,

when do you have such power and such contrary wills,

to make and unmake things so charming?” —Petrarch

Petrarch, one of the best-known Italian poets of the Renaissance, built a legacy around the ephemeral emotion of grief. He once lamented that everything pleasing in the world was to him nothing more than a breve sogno (a brief dream). He described himself as having a yearning mind, as a man who thought and wept and wrote. He did so as a restless rambl...