Fragments Of Lost Wisdom

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 was of the royal blood that ruled the Greek city of Ephesus, but renounced his heritage. He looked on his fellow Ephesians with a certain aristocratic disdain and hated the mediocrity of those who "eat their way/toward sleep like nameless oxen." His countrymen, he wrote, "say, No man should be/worthier than average. Thus,/my fellow citizens declare,/whoever would seek/excellence can find it/elsewhere among others." He was sardonically hardheaded: "Hungry livestock,/though in sight of pasture,/need the prod."

It's bracing to come upon an intelligent elitist long, long dead, especially when we live in an Ephesus of our own, filled, as his was, with mediocrities and idiot intoxications. Haxton writes in his introduction: "To a sober mind, the drunkenness of cultic worshippers must have been particularly unappealing in a cosmopolitan city like Ephesus, with gods of wine on every side, drunken Greeks initiated into the Thracian ecstasies of Dionysus running amok with drunken Phrygians worshipping Sabazius, Lydians possessed by Bassareus, and Cretans in the frenzy of Zagreus, all claiming in their cups to have transcended understanding."

The Fragments speak in an eerily contemporary voice. Heraclitus anticipated Einstein's theory that energy is the essence of matter: "All things change to fire,/and fire exhausted/falls back into things." The metaphor of Heraclitean fire posits 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 into the earth."

Here is the ultimate economy: "As all things change to fire,/and fire exhausted/falls back into things,/the crops are sold/ for money spent on food."

But at least these words have, for 2,500 years, survived the fire.