I do not read classical Greek.  I studied enough koine Greek or common Greek to be able to pronounce these words.  Whenever I read them, unaccountsbly I feel close to Heraclitus of Ephesus, the Pre-Socratic philosopher.  Heraclitus was a contrarian.

While it is natural to look for permanence, to seek permanence in the systems we conceive, the roads and buildings which we build,— Heraclitus said that the essential feature of reality was change.  There is one thing and one thing alone that we can count on: change.  Heraclitus was eccentric, out of step with the spirit of his age and of every age.  Everyone grasp at permanence.  We live to resist change.  We propose to build a insanely costly wall on our southern border, we have waged war and murdered strangers,  — to prevent change.

Heraclitus assertion is a philosophical stake driven into the earth, and his statement still holds.  Heraclitus said,

“Everything changes and nothing remains…”

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Yesterday I spent hours unpacking boxes of books, poetry, philosophy, history, social criticism, short stories.  In our move to Batavia these were placed in boxes and were among the last items to be unpacked from shipping cartons for placement on shelves.  Two tables, placed end-to-end are a staging platform for stacks of books.  The challenge is to consider the title and content and author of each book and decide which category represented by the columns on the table tops, — to place the volume.  I made up the classification categories.   The classifications seem reasonable to me. I place the book in hand with the post-modern intellectuals, Baudrillard and Deleuze and Heidegger.  Poets are well represented: Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot and Billy Collins.

Viewing and handling the books I feel a sense of satisfaction and of sufficiency.  These writers are astute observers, chroniclers, and interpreters of change.  I consider my books, and there are more than a few, to be the functioning contents of my toolbox.  On another account books are analogous to the ammunition that a combatant, a freedom fighter equips him or herself for surviving the conflict of ideas, the contest of will, that is life itself.

I read somewhere that in the Vietnam war if a soldier had to make a choice between carrying more food or more ammo, the choice was always,

…….carry more ammunition.