Your Understanding un-Donne.

I just want to tip my hat to John Donne, whose ghost will murmur through the story I'm working on.  In the following prose, he redefines inconstancy in order to commend it as a virtue.

But... how?

And that is where the genius rides.  A writer has the uncanny ability to recast a word in your mind; to alter the perception you hardly knew that you had.  That is why the most evil villain is the one who the writer crafts to act friendly, to speak enticingly, or appear as lovely and beautiful.

I will let Donne speak for himself.  The analogies--beautiful.  Reader, decide.

"That Women are Inconstant, I with any man confesse, but that Inconstancy is a bad quality, I against any man will maintaine: For every thing as it is one better than another, so it is fuller of change; The Heavens themselves continually turne, the Starres move, the Moone changeth; Fire whirleth, Ayre flyeth, Water ebbs and flowes, the face of the Earth altereth her lookes, time stayes not; the Colour that is most light, will take most dyes: so in Men, they that have the most reason are the most alterable in their designes, and the darkest or most ignorant, do seldomest change; therefore Women changing more than Men, have also more Reason.  They cannot be immutable like stockes, like stones, like the Earths dull Center; Gold that lyeth still, rusteth; Water, corrupteth; Aire that moveth not, poysoneth; then why should that which is the perfection of other things, be imputed to Women as greatest imperfection? 

...

To conclude therefore; this name of Inconstancy, which hath so much been poysoned with slaunders, ought to bee changed into variety, for the which the world is so delightfull, and a Woman for that the most delightfull thing in this world."