Word: changeless
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...poems about Byzantium, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats seemed drawn to the city's stylized art because it provided a release from the restraints of his own frailties. Yeats longed to exchange the "fury and mire of human veins" for the "changeless metal" of the city's mechanical golden birds, whose beauty he felt to be permanent. There is historical evidence that the Byzantines, too, revered artifice while denigrating the human flesh: self-castration was a popular means of purification, and mutilation a prevalent form of punishment - one Emperor even wore a gold nose as a result...
...really seems to have mastered is the art of remaining highly visible, yet at some level out of sight. His thoughts and longings are not chronicled in the daily papers; instead, he remains a figurehead who holds the country together in part by projecting an image of constancy, changeless even as he guides his nation through a series of dramatic, modernizing changes...
...remote islands of the South Pacific, however, there remain tribes that are the last links to that changeless way of life, some making contact with the outside world for the first time last century; and there are many for whom the traditions of their ancestors are vibrantly alive. Yet in the cultural tug-of-war, the pull of modernity is powerful and relentless, and though some dig in their heels, the ties to tradition are beginning to fray...
...settled place, governed by tribal elders, steadied by ancient traditions, with a village green around which everyone can gather. A village, in the popular imagination, has a quaint and settled air; it moves on the human scale. There may be village idiots, but the village itself observes the changeless rhythms of nature and religion...
...controversies, the deeper question is how the inherently authoritarian leadership of the Catholic Church--in many ways sclerotic, brittle, self-defensive in the manner of all aging bureaucracies--can preserve what is best and permanent, what is sacred, while letting in fresh air and new life. Can what is changeless be preserved only by the intelligent application of change? --By Lance Morrow