A man kindles a light in the night
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ἄνθρωπος ἐν εὐφρόνῃ φάος ἅπτεται ἑωυτῷ ἀποσβεσθεὶς ὄψεις. ζῶν δὲ ἅπτεται τεθνεῶτος εὕδων, ἐγρηγορὼς ἅπτεται εὕδοντος
A person, in the night, kindles a light for himself when his sight is quenched; living, he touches the dead in his sleep, and waking, he touches the sleeper.
Preserved by Clement of Alexandria (Stromateis 4.141). A dense sequence of touchings: in the night a person kindles a light for himself; the living touches the dead, the waking touches the sleeping. The verb ἅπτεται means both 'kindles' and 'lays hold of' — the fragment runs on that double sense.
The fragment is built on one verb, ἅπτεται, doing two jobs at once: it means 'kindles, sets alight' and 'lays hold of, touches.' When a man's eyes go out at nightfall — his sight 'quenched,' <em>aposbestheis</em>, the same word Heraclitus uses of the cosmic fire being put out — he lights a lamp of his own; deprived of the outer light he makes an inner one. So the sleeper is never wholly cut off from the fire of life; even blind in the dark he is kindling.
Then the touchings multiply. The living man in sleep 'touches' the dead, the waking man 'touches' the sleeping — each state reaches across to its opposite and is in quiet contact with it. Sleep is a rehearsal of death, waking of life, and none of the four is sealed off; they are graded conditions of the one soul-fire, dimmer or brighter. It is the same insight as B21 ("death is all we see awake; all we see asleep is sleep") and B88's chain of living-and-dead, waking-and-sleeping: the boundaries we treat as absolute are, for Heraclitus, places where opposite states lay hold of each other.
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