Born to have deaths
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γενόμενοι ζώειν ἐθέλουσι μόρους τ᾽ ἔχειν καὶ παῖδας καταλείπουσι μόρους γενέσθαι
Once born, they wish to live and to have their deaths — and they leave children behind to be born as deaths in turn.
Preserved by Clement of Alexandria (Stromata), who reads it as Heraclitus lamenting birth. Once born, men wish to live and to meet their deaths — and leave children behind, new deaths in the making.
The bleakest of the fragments, and the reason Clement thought Heraclitus was condemning birth itself. The logic is airtight and grim: to be born is already to be handed a <em>moros</em>, a doom, a fated death; and yet the born want to live, which is to want the very death bound up with living. The word matters. <em>Moros</em> is not neutral 'death' but one's allotted portion of it, kin to <em>moira</em>, the share fate deals out — so 'to have deaths' means to hold the lot that came with the birth.
Then the turn that makes it worse. They do not merely die; they 'leave behind' (<em>kataleipousi</em>) children, and Heraclitus names the children by their end: <em>morous genesthai</em>, 'to be born as deaths.' Procreation is the propagation of mortality — each new life another doom set going. It is the dark underside of the flux: where B21 blurs waking life into death and B62 has mortals and immortals living each other's dying, here the chain simply reproduces itself, birth after birth handing on the same sentence.
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