By JOHN LYON
Long have we media-ended our days, with virtual Mass attendance daily at 7:45 a.m., and reading aloud to each other sometime after 7:00 p.m. from various sources, including fiction, history, philosophy, physical science, theology, and poetry.
We sat that November night as was our wont, celebrating a long-shared life at end of day, my wife knitting, and I reading aloud. The year was 11/12ths gone, the day the same, my life likewise at least. The woodstove ineffectually attempting to warm my cold feet, our border collie curled in upon herself on the front porch behind us, hot tea steaming in mugs beside us, we slowly entered into our pursuit of the meaning of fragments of the thought of the Pre-Socratics — Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides — in the prose of Heidegger’s Early Greek Thinking, fortunately translated for us by David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi.
Taking the advice of Heraclitus, we tried to listen not to him, but to the Logos, “and to say, in accordance with the Logos: all is one” (p. 5). Parmenides had also forewarned us that “Thinking and the thought ‘it is’ are the same.” We hardly needed Heraclitus’ admonitory question: “How can one hide himself before that which never sets?” (p. 6) Nevertheless, we two beings somewhat methodically pursued Being, which fled as we read, as the “Anaximander Fragment” dualistically, cryptically forewarned us: “But where beings have their origin there also their passing away occurs, according to necessity; for they pay recompense and penalty to each other for their injustice, according to the assessment of time” (Diels and Kranz trans.; “Introduction” to Early Greek Thinking, p. 5).
We placidly circumgressed through the darkness of the night and the dubiety of the text, and saw, through Heidegger, that, “as it reveals itself in beings Being withdraws.” Forewarned by the translators that the “Anaximander Fragment” is not an idyll for weary men who would, like Hamlet’s crab, go backward, we came to a greater realization that: “Only in thoughtful dialogue with what it says can this fragment of thinking be translated” (p. 19).
The aroma of the coffee seduced. And perished.
And so, strive as we must toward participated being, we knew ourselves to be the children of modern philosophy, and experienced “beings as objects.” We had not the “questioning address of early thinking.” We were sifting and sorting, not wondering, “What does all this mean and how could it happen?” (Heraclitus). We were the offspring of historicism, and thus not open to “presencing” as “luminous self-concealing.” So there we sat, attempting to translate two translators’ translation of Heidegger’s translation of three nearly three-millennia removed Greeks’ translation of the meaning of “Logos,” of legein, the “laying that gathers.” But, despite the hour, we were in some fashion in the storm of being, and not yet enlightened.
Something then knocked at the door. Nearer now to the twelfth-twelve, we wondered. Being seeking entry? More likely just more beings in the storm of being, seeking the distraction of beings thus be-stormed. And so it was.
Two women, mild-complected, middle-aged Jehovah’s Witnesses, stood before us offering slight, printed documents “proving” that we were designed to live forever, “a happy, unending life with family and friends — Psalm 37:11, 29.” Startled as I was by the mental contemporaneity of Anaximander, Heidegger, and the JWs, and despite being a reasonably educated twenty-first century American and professed Roman Catholic, I was, as one of our sons put it once when we questioned the propriety of his behavior, “Being haved!”
We parted amicably, though my mind was contorted by the incongruities of the situation and the apparently ad hoc nature of the dispensations of divine Providence. What sort of a world, if not cosmos, did we inhabit? Was there any telling? When subsequently I described the situation and asked a good priest friend these questions, I received a reassuring reply. We are here to help each other along as we travel toward Heaven, he suggested. Right! Fine, I thought! The terrain is treacherous, however. And if neither we nor our companions are clear-sighted, whence shall we gather true vision? From a Divinity whose presencing is luminous self-concealment in human form?
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