Finishing the exam has left me in a fragmented sort of mood. Here are some choice selections from a copy of a shiny newish translation by Brooks Haxton of Heraclitus' Fragments—the last seems particularly apposite:
8
Men dig tons of earth
to find an ounce of gold.
10
Things keep their secrets.
14
Now that we can travel anywhere,
we need no longer take the poets
and myth-makers for sure witnesses
about disputed facts.
17
Pythagoras may well have been
the deepest in his learning of all men.
And still he claimed to recollect
details of former lives,
being in one a cucumber
and one time a sardine.
24
Hunger, even
in the elements,
and insolence.
31
Without the sun,
what day? What night?
32
The sun is new
again, all day.
38
Thus in the abysmal dark
the soul is known by scent.
45
The mind, to think of the accord
that strains against itself,
needs strength, as does the arm
to string the bow or lyre.
50
Under the comb
the tangle and the straight path
are the same.
52
The sea is both pure
and tainted, healthy
and good haven to the fish,
to men impotable and deadly.
58
Good and ill to the physician
surely must be one,
since he derives his fee
from torturing the sick.
59
Two made one are never one.
Arguing the same we disagree.
Singing together we compete.
We choose each other
to be one, and from the one
both soon diverge.
64
Though what the waking see is deadly,
what the sleeping see is death.
66
The living when the dead
wood of the bow
springs back to life, must die.
67
Gods live past our meager death.
We die past their ceaseless living.
69
The way up is the way back.
72
Moisture makes the soul
succumb to joy.
74
Dry, the soul
grows wise
and good.
77
A man in the quiet of the night
is kindled like a fire soon quenched.
82
The rule that makes
its subject weary
is a sentence
of hard labor.
84
Goat cheese melted
in warm wine congeals
if not well stirred.
90
Even a soul submerged in sleep
is hard at work, and helps
make something of the world.
92
Although we need the Word [logos]
to keep things known in common,
people still treat specialists
as if their nonsense
were a form of wisdom.
98
To a god the widsom
of the wisest man
sounds apish. Beauty
in a human face
looks apish too.
In everything
we have attained
the excellence of apes.
105
Yearning hurts,
and what release
may come of it
feels much like death.
108
Not to be quite such a fool
sounds good. The trick,
with so much wine
and easy company, is how.
121
One's bearing
shapes one's fate.
128
A sacred ritual
may be performed by one
entirely purified but seldom.
Other rites belong to those
confined in the sodden
lumber of the body.
130
Silence, healing.
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