The ebb and flow of the narrative, with each side gaining and losing, cutting off heads here and parading humiliated captives through the streets there, exemplifies the overarching theme, so deeply imbued in Buddhism, of human transience.
Stoppard is always praised for his intellectual ingenuity: far more important is how, even in his late 20s, he was obsessed with human transience.
The marvelous "Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon," for example, with the couple standing as if petrified by an extraterrestrial encounter, is about divine immanence and human transience.
There's less space, in the short-story format, for the more apocalyptic aspects of Gee's imagination, yet she remains uniquely adept at suggesting human transience and impermanence.
Even the famous cherry blossom symbolised passing time and human transience, and the overwhelming sense of melancholy was reinforced by Ninagawa's repeated use of the Fauré Requiem and the Samuel Barber Adagio for Strings.
Among many visiting Macbeths, I also recall Yukio Ninagawa's Japanese production (Edinburgh 1985), which with its cascading cherry-blossom and plangent music became a melancholic meditation on human transience.
Support for human rights.
We called for human dignity.
In the lovely, compassionate "When Did You Last See Castagno?" - a "life's journey" poem in the deftest of terza rima - the poet addresses a painted Last Supper through the detail of a bird, which he first brings to contemporary life as a sparrow inside the church and then releases into Bede's famous image for the transience of human life.
