Word: heraclitus
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...Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived and wrote 2,500 years ago--around the same time as Confucius, Lao Tzu and the Buddha--is best known as the man who said you cannot put your foot into the same river twice...
Here is how the poet Brooks Haxton, in his fine new translation of Heraclitus, Fragments, the Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus (Viking; 99 pages; $19.95), puts the thought: "The river/where you set/your foot just now/is gone--/those waters/ giving way to this,/now this...
Such fragments are all that is left of Heraclitus' great book, On Nature, which was lost many centuries ago. They come to us with a scattered, enigmatic quality--epigrams and bits of poetry saved from the ruins. But they also have a wit and, for someone known as an obscure philosopher, a prismatic clarity that travels well across centuries. The thoughts remain fresh and profound. Haxton's translation shines them up handsomely. "To a god the wisdom/of the wisest man/sounds apish. Beauty/in a human face/looks apish too./In everything/we have attained/the excellence of apes...
...Heraclitus said: "Stupidity is better/ kept a secret/ than displayed." And: "Seekers of wisdom first/ need sound intelligence...
...Fragments speak in an eerily contemporary voice. Heraclitus anticipated Einstein in the realization that energy is the essence of matter: "All things change to fire,/ and fire exhausted/ falls back into things." The metaphor of Heraclitean fire posited an absolutely unstable world, in constant flux, consuming and creating, the alternation and reconciliation of day and night, waking and sleeping, life and death, wet and dry, good and evil. "What was cold soon warms,/ and warmth soon cools./ So moisture dries,/ and dry things drown." And: "The earth is melted/ into the sea/ by that same reckoning/ whereby the sea/ sinks...