by Sarah Deane
I never had much of a relationship with the word ephemeral. Our encounters were brief enough that they rarely registered. Ephemeral sat at the edge of my vocabulary, a background presence that had no discernible effect on me as I went about my life. If I wanted to describe something that existed briefly, I reached for the word temporary. Its meaning was clear, and it was a word I could hear myself say.
Lately, though, ephemeral has begun to surface often, and I find it a little troublesome. Part of the reason is a tension of my own making. I seem to have fused it with ethereal, so that it carries ghosts and rainbows and a certain mistiness the dictionary never sanctioned. Ephemeral comes from the Greek ephēmeros, meaning ‘lasting a day’, and ethereal comes from aether, the upper air. I suspect that somewhere along the line the two blurred because they sound alike, and my brain did the rest. A meaning half-borrowed, half-invented, with a basis in reality, something I seem to have confabulated along the way. I suspect I’m not alone in allowing words to blend like this, though I have no idea how many people have made this particular muddle.
The bigger reason I find it troublesome is where I keep meeting it. In my conversations with LLMs, mostly about my own work, it is a word that recurs, and it stands out precisely because it is not one I would ever use. Its frequency makes it feel like a telltale sign that maybe a machine rather than a human wrote the text. I don’t know if the machines favour it, or if I’ve simply become more sensitive to it, or even if that really matters. The issue is that a word that was once in the background is now very much in the foreground and it bothers me. I never described my work as ephemeral in either the dictionary sense or in my own hybrid one. I suppose in some vain way I think of my work as lasting much longer than me, as outliving me and being permanent rather than fleeting. But the continued appearance of ephemeral is challenging this and my idea of myself in the world.
Strip away the association with machines and the word describes something profound about being human and that is that we are temporary. The things we make may exist beyond us: our photographs may remain after we are gone, our words may circulate without us, and the machines we build will carry on regardless. Our bodies won’t. Nor will our consciousness, however permanent it feels from the inside. That impermanence is hard to accept because it unsettles more than our sense of time. It unsettles our sense of standing apart. Ephemeral is the word that insists we are not the centre of things. We are taught that the world began with us and exists for us. We like to imagine ourselves as exceptional, as separate, as somehow above the other species and lives with which we share the world, and above even the machines we have created. But the natural world makes no such distinction and never has.
It’s possible that being neither permanent nor exceptional feels harder to accept now than it once did. We are surrounded by things designed to persist beyond us, and that is challenging our notion of selfhood, of what it is to be human. Our words and images pass between people, through networks, through machines, and return to us altered. Things we make can outlive us, while the idea that everything we produce begins and ends with an individual human mind becomes harder to hold onto.
Perhaps being human at this particular moment is to discover that we are more fleeting and less individual than we care to imagine.
I still don’t like the word ephemeral and I probably never will. Maybe that is because it has become harder to avoid what it is telling me.
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