For a brief moment it is dark, and then the rush of light. The miracle of waking up is so mundane, to leave the haze of sleep, the land of dreams, and then awaken to a world of life and movement—it is all too much. Perhaps today I will manifest something to equal the splendor of simply waking up.

I rise, the limbs creakier and heavier. Once upon a time I could spring out of bed like a cat. Now I spread my limbs, yawn, and stretch like a cat. Same difference. We are not so different from cats, after all.

Once, when I was very young, I went for a walk through the forest by the house in which we grew up in Stuttgart. The walk was of the highest order because I kept no goal in sight, no destination called me. I walked and walked until I came across a cat who, like me, walked through the forest aimlessly. An overwhelming sadness took me. The cat looked satisfied and yet I could not help wondering if he needed food. My life felt so cushy by comparison; I’d wake up and mom would make food; at night I could guarantee some fresh fowl or fish to send me to bed warm and happy. But this cat—could it boast the same privilege? Or did it suffer

Imagine working for your food, I thought, how strange, I thought, to work for food, the poor thing.

So I ran home with a goal in mind and a destination. I found some milk and raw meat in salt, then I ran back to the woods, looking for the cat. I reached the same sun-speckled spot, where the sunlight shot through the holes of worm-eaten leaves. Though I could not find the cat the leftovers of the corpse of a bird of a red or orange colored feather littered the area. Immensely proud of the cat, I left the meat and milk as a sort of reward or desert.

There is a boastfulness in the following statement: God is like me when I took pity on a cat that did not need pity. He gives us desserts after we hunt for ourselves. Is God, like me, superfluous?

…

But it is too early for these questions. When we first were married Marie would say to me, “Stop all this philosophizing before we’ve had our first meal.” And I’d oblige, but it was difficult—how do you stop thinking, stop following the trains of thought that wrack around the brain at all hours of the day?

I walk from out the bedroom and greet the increased streaks of light that paint the walls of the living room. Wealthy, wealthy Marie. How lovely is the sound of thy name and the tune of thy house that holds such heavenly beauty. Architecture is an underrated science, what with all its opening doors for the Divine. The small house in Stuttgart, the large house in Berlin. The stained glass windows combined with the heavenly organ sonatas produced such an overwhelming sensory experience I thought I’d seen God through my nerves. Your twenties are a period of thinking you’ve seen God, your thirties are actually seeing Him, your forties are trying to get others to see him, too, your fifties are giving up on the idea of sharing what you’ve seen, and your sixties, I’m learning, are the time where you try again to share your knowledge of higher things, but you start from scratch, return to the basics.

There is a small stream near our house, where I occasionally sit and write. Many years ago a friend of mine said he could refute Heraclitus’ entire philosophical project. We found a river on a walk and he stuck his foot in. “Now, watch this,” he said, and stuck his foot in again in the same spot.

“I have stepped in the same river twice,” he said with the pride of Diogenes.

I remember incomprehensible revulsion set over me—how does one even begin to explain that such cynicism is to miss the point entirely? Because I simply smiled, I assume he thinks he won that intellectual parley. But ever since then I’ve set out to establish that we are never stepping in the same river twice, that indeed each day is a new river and a new promenade through Experience. There is freedom in the notion, but it is a hard freedom to accept. Why is liberation—that which is ostensibly so grand and great, so difficult to accept, even when it is freely given to us?

Oh—I am teaching today. History of Philosophy—Heraclitus is the subject. On my desk is the text. When I walk from here, the open space, the sunlight, to there, the cloister shut-in and darkened, I feel the oppressive weight of what all this scholarship’s about—and what is it all about? Enlightenment? Knowledge? The shedding off of “knowledge” the gaining of… what is it we gain? Nature begets… begetting. Produce makes produce.

The text for today. Plutarch. Strange dialogue. “The Epsilon at Delphi.”

“‘It is impossible to go into the same river twice’, said Heraclitus; no more can you grasp mortal being twice, so as to hold it. So sharp and so swift its change; it scatters and brings together again, nay not again, no nor afterwards; even while it is being formed it fails, it approaches, and it's gone. Hence becoming never ends in being, for the process never leaves off, or is stayed.”

This fragment is the foundation of all knowledge, not all wisdom. Wisdom leads to action, to the Socrateses and the Jesuses. Knowledge leads to the weeping philosophers, those who hide in darkened corners and spout mysteries and magic to themselves. But then again, this may be all wisdom and no knowledge. Whatever it is, it is not both.

And what am I as I awake and await the always unexpected ailments and blessings of a brand new day? Students at school, teachers who teach and gossip of students, students who confide in me about their teachers they dislike in turn. It’s a whole lot of talking, the daily routine—but where’s the wisdom? What have I accumulated? Certainly knowledge of a kind—but wisdom? I feel as though I have it—but true wisdom, I am learning, is a silent suffering, one not so much celebrated with pride as endured. One who knows this and strikes against it out of revenge, citing Hindu Vedas for support, will perish.

I have no idea what I’m doing.

But I sense a truth that resonates in the tension of mere Being.

The truth is the same one I remember now as I walk down these steps and into the kitchen where the water is wailing on the stove. The coffee that I take today will taste just like the first coffee I ever drank. The novelty of coffee made the entire enterprise entertaining. Myself and one other student, I cannot even remember his name, went to the coffee house and tried cups both with and without sugar. The first sip of bitterness felt wholly alien—it tasted like nothing I’d ever tasted before. In that moment, I could hardly believe it was a real taste. And now I taste it every day, and its familiarity betrays the strangeness of its mere existence.

We could say the same about ourselves. How overwhelmingly strange it is to Be, and by extension, how overwhelmingly strange it is to not Be. The strangeness is so strange neither Being nor non-Being out-strange the other. They are, perhaps, the same.

The river is the same river, but it is a different. The same difference.

I am not who I was when I tried that coffee, but still I am and still my name applies and grounds my Being in a time and place in history that—

The clock does not betray me, and if I do not exit now I will be late. With haste run into the room and throw on clothes and out the door. Marie, where is she? Out walking—always up before me. The books are all laid out on the desk from the night before—into the pack. Now off we go, out the door. A dog that is not mine barks at me, shoo. We go straight which is East and then off the shoo and into the park where the walk is calm.

We slow down to a softer pace, like Church organ works before the Sunday service starts. Always preferred those Organs when they’re soft and slow and not that chaotic end-of-church music they love so much here. Before the service I hear, “la, la, la, Jesu, Jesu, Jesu” through the pipes, but after church I hear, “DEE DOO LEEDEET DEET DEE DOO LEET LEET LEET DELELELELELE LELELELELELE” and it gives me a goddam headache.

Gosh darn.

Darn.

Although I know more about philosophy and history and theology than probably anybody I’ve met, I know nothing about the birds around me. Here comes one now, a whitish blue, beautiful, its trilling vocals serenading and seducing some unseen upper-class Sadducee of a bird, surely. Or perhaps it sings for no reason whatsoever. Do the myriad humans all look the same to a flock of doves as the flock of doves all look the same to a human? I cannot tell one dove from the next, they all look like doves. Do they feel the same about us? Or are we, perhaps, actually imbued with difference—as we so badly want to believe?

The streets are crowded for a cloudy morning. Clops of horse hooves, and off to the side the jingling from unknown sources. There are people laughing and talking as they walk down beside me, walking past me. Have I seen any of these people before? Surely I have, yet I’ve never recognized them. It is as though I see them for the first time.

There are people laughing. Some women are carrying food home. Some students are walking towards the university--same direction as me. The walk to school as a child is an adventure, as an adult it is meditation. Why not both?

There are people laughing. On the ground huddled outside the bakery is a boy with dirt all over his face and clothes. Clothes that look like rags that are tattered, torn, and tussled like the browned hair upon his head.

He looks up with a face that models the marble busts of Heraclitus.

“Please, sir…”

He holds out his hands as if for prayer. The image of the Divine dying a death that covers all the multitude of individuality. A river runs through the world and loops around, surrounding the environs with its grace and soft murmur; constant sloosh and slush of rushing water. Me and this boy, we are not so different; we are one and the same; I am rich and he is poor; I am old, he is young; in these differences do we unite.

We are Truth and Being and non-Being all at once.

A snap of nausea.

…

I walk without stopping. I am running late for class.

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