Dust is particulate matter, the dispersed, disordered raw material from which everything ordered and coherent arises, and it is to dust that the complex decays.

[...]

Everything that we understand as consistent, the living creature, the machine, the tree, are dust in its coherent phase, part of its continuous evolutionary cycle from order to disorder, from growth to decay repeated in seemingly endless variations.

[...]

Life is powered by a sun that has lived millions of times longer than the humans and the cycles we see are tiny ripples in a system that takes billions of years to run down. These cycles are open ended. Every time a thing is born and later dies and decays, the world does not return to where it was before the cycle. The dust to which decay returns is greater than the dust that had created it. The cycles of life and death increase entropy; with each revolution the net disorder increases in the universe. The disordered phase in the nature of dust grows at the expense of its ordered one.

Even the lives of stars seem cyclic. Our sun contains the debris of older generations of stars, and this cosmic recycling may last forever. But even the life of a star is only a moment in the total life of our universe, and the birth and death of generations of stars increase disorder just as life does, and there will eventually be a final generation of stars after which there will be no more.



(Extracts from 'Book of Dust' by Agnes Denes - cited in Nothing, edited by Graham Gussin & Ele Carpenter)