This essay is from Belloc’s volume Silence of the Sea, which apparently isn’t as available as it should be .It is strange to find things that are not on the internet, but this wasn’t and it should be, especially now.    Take a step back from supposedly the worst year ever and realize, things will go on, and it’s not that bad.  Read some history get some perspective and take a walk in the country.

In times of grave public anxiety, after the tempest and destruction of universal war, after the expectation of further destruction and tempest, it is of hight value to consider permanence, or what may be called the “Permanency of Impermanence.”  It is not only a consolation but a strength; a strength through the contemplation of a great reality and a steadfast truth.  for though you may not affirm of any on thing in the mortal world that it is permanent, yet you may affirm of Permanency itself that it is permanent.  You may repeat to yourself with confidence that the principle of permanence underlies all vicissitude.

So when we say to ourselves “ When shall we see again the immemorial hills, the deep woods, and the quiet rivers undisturbed?  When shall we again know Europe?” we are not asking a question in vain.  There is a restoration, and lost things return.  the earth upon which these human changes pass with such consuming violence has in itself a rhythm which endures and thoroughly belittles the accidents of excess.  The sowing and the harvest, the new green and the fall of the leaves, the rising of a generation, its passing and its renewal, and out beyond all these the solemn circling of the Heavens—these are the foundation for the mind.  Not that even these are eternal, but that they are in tune with the Eternal and a promise thereof.

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Herein I for my part discover the principal value of history.  History has many high values. It has been called by wise men “the principal school of politics.” It shows clearly enough in its largest lines the limits to which the most generous enthusiasms must be confined, the term beyond which the most just of reforms may not venture, and the minimum at least of evil which human society must learn to endure. It adds a third dimension to experience; for as we garner a knowledge of reality from our daily contact with men and through observation along the course of life, we are still, as it were, only contemplating the surface. But when we call to our aid the record of centuries, depth is added to this mere surface: stuff: solidity. It becomes another and a greater thing.

History also gives you the knowledge of character. It gives you (if you read it with wisdom) an increasing appreciation of accident in human affairs. It is certainly a breeder of humility which, in its most general aspect, is no more than a seeing of ourselves (and of things) as they are. But still the principal value of history is the certain lesson it teaches that the underlying substance, even of society, certainly of the living world as a whole, is a symbol of permanence.  It is a commonplace, but one of profound significance, that our minds find repose in the watching of the ancient ritual, and most of all in watching that most ancient of all rituals, the recurrent dealing of man with the earth which made him, to which he returns, and whence his posterity shall spring.

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I remember once in Barbary seeing a pleasing sight.  It was near sunset upon the last slopes of fruitful and with many trees, orchards and vineyards.  A man was ceasing from his labor of ploughing in his field.  He prostrated himself eastward for the evening prayer.  In that plain so slightly below me were certain ruins (scarcely visible) of a city deserted this thousand years and more.  There had passed over that landscape every kind of revolution.  Its Pagan gods had been forgotten long, long ago.  Its Christian shrines and the hight culture about them, the movement of the millions in its noisy towns, the march and the trumpet calls of armies, the sails of galleys approaching harbor (a harbor long since ruined and unused), all these had gone their way.  They had passed along their road, and had left not even shades remaining.  But the man who had ploughed his field still ploughed it as did his fathers, and, in due course, he would gather his harvest.  Soon the sun would set and the sudden darkness of land under Atlas would fall, the last light would linger upon the distant summits, and then in the little while leaving them also to look up towards silence the stars.  But the night would pass, and with the morning there would be a new prayer in gratitude for the sun’s rising and the life advancing from the east, and the ploughing of the field would begin anew.

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Even that recurrent ritual of man and the earth will go tis way at last, after we know not what aeons of time.  Yet there is about the aspect of such things, the fields and their fruits, the procession of the hours and the seasons, of the days and worst of the days, something which makes them not so much an example of mortality as a mirror of permanence; and I would have any man whom our times have overwrought seek his nourishment again among those peasants who have thus, since first men dwelt together under laws and worshipped the divine, formed one with the land the till. To such a scene would I come back when the return of peace itself permits the journey.  I now where to find the place again.  I know I shall find it the same, or if not I, those who come after me.  It is in visions such as this that there arises the hight verse of mankind, the chief expression of the soul, and itself, again, the most permanent, as the things of humanity go.  Even high verse is not for every, but its savor of perennial life, its timelessness, is consonant wit the all-enduring.

Nor does verse only spring from such roots, but wisdom also, though of a general kind and not particular or applied.  The wisest men, in the bulk, are the men who have tilled the earth and whose fathers have tilled it before them, and the least wise, without a doubt, are those who miss the meaning of that august sequence in human affairs.  Moreover, any civilization must be near its end when its cities outweigh its countrysides.  It must be on the very edge of dissolution when those cities have grown so huge that they have lost contact with, and remembrance of, the furrows.

The Heavens, which are so much more ancient and will outlast that which they roof, are not themselves for ever, but they have “forever” written large upon them, for all men to read, and, having read, to make seisin of their own dignity and of their immortal destinies.  We, part of their household, may on that account repeat without fear that the immemorial hills, the deep woods, and the quiet rivers shall return.