I find joy in making connections, and awhile back I recognized the following link, connecting two writers who were separated by close to 2500 years. It got my mind very excited, and was about as close to a mental orgasm as I can get. The two writers that caused this great stir were Borges and Heraclitus. I was reading Borges, who reaches levels of brilliance that continue to amaze me, and he is, and has been for some time, my favorite author. In the afterword to ‘The Maker’ I found the following. Listen:
“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.” (J.L.B. ‘The Maker,’ Trans by Andrew Hurley)
And then what does Heraclitus, a Greek separated by thousands of years and vast cultural upheavals, say?
“A man’s character is his fate”
Heraclitus no doubt has a more simple formulation than Borges, but I’m of course partial to the poetry of Borges… “that patient labyrinth of lines” is to me a wonderfully poetic and simply beautiful image in its own right, abstract though it may be. In any case, personal opinions aside, it looks like these two are coming at the same idea from opposite directions. Heraclitus seems to be saying that a man’s character predetermines his fate. In other translations of the quote, which I can’t verify, we get “Character is destiny” and “A man’s character is his daemon.” The more I look into this, the more I am coming to question the original translation above, which I got from The Adventures of Augie March. However, I’ll put this aside and assume it’s accurate. In the 'Augie March' translation it certainly could be that Heraclitus is meaning our characters determine our fates.
Now Borges flips this ‘characters creates fate’ notion on its head. Our fates are what we have filled our lives with - the rooms and kingdoms and ships. And then, as in a mystery that finally reveals itself at the end of the movie, the character finds that the summation of all the things that have populated his life turn out to be an image of his own face. The face is identical to self in this image, thus it is our characters that we have revealed. Our fates define our characters.
However, when Heraclitus says that character is fate, I suppose it’s also quite possible that he doesn’t imply the one creates the other, but rather that they are two sides to the same coin. As with Descartes’ “Cogito ego sum,” thinking does not lead to being, but rather they both necessitate the other. Character and fate may appear discrete when written in words, but are inseparable notions when played out in real life. So, would Heraclitus accept the formulation “Destiny is Character?” Of course I have no idea, only guesses.
What impresses me most here is that there is this common theme between character and fate that both authors have picked up on. These deep themes that run through human nature must be apparent enough to inspire two writers from totally different cultures, and then to also inspire the reader, i.e. myself, to pick up on this common theme. That people have these themes running through their lives, and that art is able to pick them out, is an exciting thing indeed.
