The Way of the Yen

Game Time

Heraclitus[1] firmly believes that language, when used well, is perfectly capable of representing reality. Yet reality, often (even in Heraclitus’s time), can be far more subtle and inconsistent than one might initially think. How, then, can we relate to a reality that often manages to break free from a context in which we can properly frame it, to another context in which that same reality eludes us? I’ll try to immerse myself in Heraclitus’s thought, unravelling the “pressure cooker” that constituted, perhaps, his most important legacy. “One cannot step into the same river twice, nor touch a mortal substance twice in the same state, for the waters flow incessantly and everything changes.”

In my youth, I often struggled with this phrase, and I make no secret of the fact that it has accompanied me on many occasions in my life. But what’s behind this sentence? Given that different waters always flow around those who immerse themselves in the same rivers, different waters flow around those who enter the same rivers. Therefore, we have the same rivers but different waters; therefore, while the waters flow, the rivers remain the same.

But let’s delve deeper.