Weathering and patina are an aesthetics of accumulation, the slow transformation of places and things by the passage of time. Ephemerality and transience present a complementary facet of melancholy aesthetics, which is not about accretion but about the transitory. Hovering at the liminal passage between states are poignant, eeting moments. The conditions of ephemerality and transience have a bittersweetness, where a momentary presence can intensify emotions. Wabi sabi, the Japanese sense of time’s passage mentioned in Chapter 18, enlists the beauty of impermanence. Juniper describes how wabi sabi ‘can be found in the arrangement of a single ower, the expression of a profound emotion in three lines of poetry, or in the perception of a mountain landscape in a single rock’, and ‘suggests such qualities as impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfection’ (Juniper, 2003, p.2).