The man who forgets where the road leads
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… τοῦ ἐπιλανθανομένου ᾗ ἡ ὁδὸς ἄγει
… of the man who forgets which way the road is leading.
Preserved by Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 4.46), in a short catalogue of Heraclitean sayings about those estranged from the Logos. Only a fragment survives — a genitive phrase describing 'the one who forgets which way the road is taking him.'
Only a scrap survives, and it turns on forgetting. The road leads somewhere — has a direction, a destination it 'brings' the walker toward — but the man in question has forgotten it, and so walks without knowing where he is going. It is the sleeper's condition again (the people who are absent while present, each turned into a private world), recast as a traveller who has lost the thread of his own route.
The Greek for 'forget,' <em>epilanthanomai</em>, hides a large word: its root is <em>lēthē</em>, oblivion, and the negation of that root is <em>a-lētheia</em>, truth — literally the un-forgotten, the un-concealed. To forget where the road leads is not a mere lapse of memory but a falling-out of the truth, a slipping back into the hidden. Heraclitus, who says the real 'loves to hide' (B123), here catches the human answer to that hiding: we forget, and the road we are on keeps leading anyway.
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