Time Is a River
Read the full text in our reader
Ποταμός τίς ἐστι τῶν γινομένων καὶ ῥεῦμα βίαιον ὁ αἰών· ἅμα τε γὰρ ὤφθη ἕκαστον, καὶ παρενήνεκται καὶ ἄλλο παραφέρεται, τὸ δὲ ἐνεχθήσεται.
Time is a kind of river of the things that happen — a violent current. For no sooner has each thing been seen than it has been swept past, and another is carried by, and that too will be swept away.
One of the book’s indelible images: time is a river, a violent torrent of everything that happens. Each thing is barely glimpsed before the current bears it off, another takes its place, and that too is swept away.
This is Marcus’s great river-image, his version of Heraclitus’ saying that you cannot step twice into the same stream. He calls ὁ αἰών, the sweep of time, a ποταμός τῶν γινομένων — "a river of the things that come to be" — and sharpens it with ῥεῦμα βίαιον, a violent torrent, not a gentle brook. Events are the water: they do not sit still to be examined but rush past under pressure. The perfect and future tenses of the last clause enact the speed — ὤφθη … παρενήνεκται … ἐνεχθήσεται: a thing "has been seen," "has already been swept past," and the next "will be carried off" — three verbs of vanishing chasing one another as fast as the current they describe.
The image cuts two ways, and Marcus means both. It is a memento of impermanence: everything you value, everything you fear, is only a momentary swirl on the surface of a flood that will not pause for it. But it is also a discipline of attention to the present. If each thing is glimpsed and gone in the same instant, then clinging to any of it — grieving what the current took, dreading what it will take — is a kind of madness, like grasping at water. What the river-consciousness teaches is to hold nothing too tightly and to meet each thing as it passes, since passing is its nature. Set beside 4.42 (change is neither good nor evil), the picture loses any note of despair: the flood is not cruel, it is simply what time is, and the wise man neither dams it nor drowns in it but lets it carry what it must.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Meditations 4.43 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Meditations — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Meditations 4.43 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/meditations-greek/4.43/