![]() ![]() “You can’t step into the same river twice,” Heraclitus is supposed to have said, to which one of his followers, Cratylus, is supposed to have replied, “You can’t step into the same river even once.” They can stand for time, for change, and for life itself. “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth,” Conrad’s Marlow recalls. Rivers can signify destiny, or coming into knowledge, or coming upon that which one would rather not know. Thoreau set off for a week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and within a day found himself lost in reflection over the reflections he saw playing on the water. They can be murky and charged with hidden meaning, like the Mississippi, which to Twain represented “the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter.” Alternatively, they can be bright and clear and mirror-like. Rivers make good metaphors-too good, perhaps. ![]()
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