The Utility of Lullabies

We read here an echo of the last sentence of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. In his translations from the Greek of Heraclitus, Haxton provides as the last fragment (number 130) "Akea" which he renders "Silence, healing" [Brooks Haxton in Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus (2001)] But the ease with which one brings the two texts in each other's ambit is disturbed by the note that Haxton supplies to the effect that the one word "has several meanings: silence, calm, lulling, healing." And with some sandman dust sprinkling textual (lull and sleep) we find ourselves contemplating another Heraclitean scene of peace through the fragment (number 124) last in the series given us in Guy Davenport's Herakleitos and Diogenes (1976 rpt 1979)

Even sleeping men are doing the world's business and helping it along.

And so we can approach Wittgenstein's sentence not only as a challenge but also as an anodyne or else we will loose sleep and be robbed of rest. It is about seeing the world aright. "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

And so for day 895
26.05.2009