At odds with their closest companion
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ᾧ μάλιστα διηνεκῶς ὁμιλοῦσι λόγῳ, τούτῳ διαφέρονται, καὶ οἷς καθ᾽ ἡμέρην ἐγκυροῦσι, ταῦτα αὐτοῖς ξένα φαίνεται
The Logos with which they most continuously consort, with this they are at variance; and the things they meet with day by day, these appear strange to them.
Preserved by Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 4.46), continuing his Heraclitean catalogue. The paradox: the Logos people are in the most unbroken daily contact with is the very thing they are at variance with, and the things they meet every day seem foreign to them.
This is the sharpest form of Heraclitus's standing complaint: it is precisely the thing people are in unbroken contact with that they are at war with, and precisely the daily and familiar that strikes them as foreign. The <em>logos</em> is not remote — it is what everyone deals with every hour, the pattern present in every encounter — and that very nearness is why it goes unrecognized. Familiarity is not knowledge; it can be its opposite.
The last word lands the blow: <em>xena</em>, 'strange, foreign.' The things they meet daily 'appear' strange — <em>phainetai</em>, appear, with its usual overtone of seeming as against being. People treat the ever-present as alien and chase the exotic, when the one account worth having is lying open in what they walk past. It is the accusation of B1 — men uncomprehending before the Logos they live beside — sharpened into a paradox: you are estranged from your closest companion because it is your closest companion.
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