But the first food we take, after we have set up for
ourselves, is air, and the last food we take is air also. We are all
chameleons in our diet, as we are all salamanders in our _habitats_,
inasmuch as we live always in the fire of our own smouldering
combustion; a gentle but constant flame, fanned every day by the same
forty hogsheads of air which furnish us not with our daily bread, which
we can live more than a day without touching, but with our momentary,
and oftener than momentary, aliment, without which we can not live five
minutes."
"We are perishing and being born again at every instant. We do literally
enter over and over again into the womb of that great mother, from
whom we get our bones, and flesh, and blood, and marrow. 'I die daily'
is true of all that live. If we cease to die, particle by particle,
and to be born anew in the same proportion, the whole movement of life
comes to an end, and swift, universal, irreparable decay resolves
our frames into the parent elements."
"The products of the internal fire which consumes us over and over
again every year, pass off mainly in smoke and steam from the lungs
and the skin.
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