CHANGE. HOW WAS I GOING TO CHANGE? HOW, AT MY age, after all these years, was I going to change? Heraclitus said that it is through change that things find repose. It was best perhaps to just let it happen. There had been no struggle as far as turning away from booze was concerned. It had happened, and that was all there was to it. All I had done was to not question it, to just let it happen. And that was change of the highest order. A change that, try and struggle as I might, I had not been able to achieve in the almost fifty years of my drinking life. Change. Repose.

I moved aside on my bedside table the book I was then rereading—Henry Miller’s A Devil in Paradise, a wonderful book if ever there was one—and placed nearer to the bed, beneath the lamp, Philip Wheelwright’s Heraclitus. Though more than half a century old, it was the most perceptive, erudite, and valuable presentation of the fragments of the philosopher, and probably always would be.

Heraclitus speaks to us from more than two thousand five hundred years ago. This is just a breath away really when you consider that almost two million years lay between the first hammer stone that man fashioned and the first bronze spike to be driven in by a hammer. And the hammer and nails of the philosopher’s words remain today as uniquely indestructible as when he spoke them, in the fifth century B.C. All was change. You could stand in the same spot by a river and stick your foot repeatedly into the water. Yet, as he said, you could not step into the same river twice, for as the river flowed, its water was thus in its flux never the same.

“Nature loves to hide,” says another of his fragments. In this fragment, Wheelwright finds much about nature concealing herself “beneath vague indications and dark hints.” There is, he says in his reading of this fragment, “a hidden attunement in nature, the discovery of which is far more deeply rewarding than the mere observation of surface patterns.” For me, this was as true of our own natures as of the vaster nature of which we are a part.

Change. The hidden and its vague dark hints. Discovery. Repose. Reward.

One fragment states simply: “I have searched myself.”

The like of this has been uttered so many countless times, dragged through the dirt and dust of lies by so many countless voices. But he is the only one who I feel is to be believed, who I feel to be wholly honest, wholly truthful in saying this.

Yes, just a breath away. I used to dream of sitting with him and speaking with him. Now I did sit with him and speak with him. On a bench, beneath the sky.

I wanted so much to give him the Wheelwright book, that he might tell me what he himself thought of it. But, of course, I could not. He could read only Greek, and while there were words and phrases of Greek to be found in it, the book was written in English, a far cry from the Ionian dialect in which he had written the great lost work from which most of the surviving fragments derived. And, of course, there was no physical hand into which to place the book, or any book, or any thing. Nor were there eyes to read it.

The other morning, on that bench, I saw a large gaping of raw wood on the trunk of the great old pear tree across the street. The big long bough that had arched almost all the way across the street had been torn from it and lay in the gutter. It had to be twenty feet long. A fucking truck, a big ugly reckless fucking van, must have crashed into that bough. I cursed the unknown truck. I wished upon the unknown driver a violent, painful, and very imminent death. He had destroyed beauty, of which there was so little left to destroy. And for nothing. The bough of the tree, the bough of beauty, lay ravaged and dead. It should instead be the ravager who lay dead and mutilated in the gutter. Or crucified on the desecrated trunk of that tree.

Staring at the open wound of that dismembered tree, I asked Heraclitus: “Where is the repose in this change?”

“Change comes by chance, not the will of gods or men. Change can never be brought about or averted. Chance is the master of all. Yes, change brings repose. It also brings strife, which is the essence of nature. Repose is strife slowed, or, at best, a respite from strife; but never a lasting escape from it. What has befallen this tree, and your love for it, is but one infinitesimal particle of water in the immeasurable sea of flux. And from that immeasurable sea of flux, the constant strife of nature, between the hot and the cold, the dry and the moist, the constant frothy waves of chance bring constant change, and in that change there is repose.”

He seemed to sense that I did not quite follow him, and he resumed:

“For is there not repose in knowing that without constant flux, the endless strife of nature, sometimes witnessed by us but for the most part hidden from us, the vast universe, the world in which we live, would cease to exist?”

There followed one of those lingering moments, like a long breath, when he seemed to leave me but did not.

“Homer was wrong in saying, ‘Would that strife might perish from amongst gods and men.’ If that were ever to be, all things would come to an end.”

Then, as if in the afterthought of inner searching, he softly said, “No, change does not always bring repose to each and all. My own death brought none to me, even as I knew it to be but one infinitesimal particle of water in the immeasurable sea of flux. No. Death brings no repose. Knowing that might bring some repose as you look upon that tree, which, though smitten by strife, still lives. As do you still live.”

When we spoke, he answered silently. But what he said was always clear in its wordless eloquence.

I never contradicted him or argued with him. Even when he silently whispered to me that I should take a drink, or do worse; even then I just sat and let his silent suggestions pass without question.

There were times when I found myself speaking aloud to him, casually gesticulating as I did so. I always caught myself when this happened. But sometimes it took me longer than other times to realize what I was doing.

One morning, something very strange happened. I was sitting with him when I heard one of two passers-by say something about “her clitoris.” It seemed such an odd phrase to overhear, yet I was certain that I had heard it.

Then, almost instantly, it hit me that she had not said “her clitoris,” but instead was mispronouncing the name of Heraclitus. She knew, I told myself. She did not know the proper pronunciation of his name—or maybe she did, and I had simply misheard her—but, in any case, she knew. She knew who was there, unseen, beside me.

I should have taken a few steps after the two women, and, excusing myself for the intrusion, asked the one I had overheard if she had spoken his name. I did not do this, but I should have. She had nice legs, too.

He himself may have heard her as well, for it was not long after this that he suggested we remove ourselves to a different bench. I had become so habituated to this bench that for a moment I hesitated. A block north, we entered little Duane Park. Walking slowly and looking round at the barren winter trees, we chose a bench, a good one, beneath one tree and facing another. It also faced a sign that, in three languages, forbade smoking. I took to aiming my cigarette butts at the sign when I flicked them.

A different bench. The notions of change and repose were in the drifting of the fallen leaves in our path.

Then one morning he was not there. And I somehow knew that he was not to return. He had moved on.