2.28
What can we learn from things, say, a heron, waves, an arbutus? Not just simple facts. And we don’t simply learn new ways to do things. Instead, we can learn ways and styles of being. For all these beings—herons, waves, arbutuses—are responses (§2.20), styles and forms of responses — they are being-responses. The world is a giant vibrating, reverberating arena of conversation.
But they aren’t just responses. They’re questions (§2.20). They’re promises and memories. Beings etch and are etched by temporality and others; they’re their temporality through and through. Temporality is a horizon for any being: beings show how time is for them.
Herons that congregate in trees at night are in constant responsiveness with the things around them: night, other herons, nests, trees. They bring with them and bear their whole past. They are the passing of each moment and the yet to come of the next. Their memories, of which they aren’t necessarily consciously aware, are held in the way they hold themselves. Likewise, memories are held in the smoothness of a stone caught in the waves at the shore: the stone is its pasts and its passing past; it carries marks from what it touches, in dialogue with the transient waves. This arbutus tree carves its past in its corkscrew journey through the sky: its history of responsiveness and inquisitiveness, shedding layers of skin.
These beings don’t carry promises: they are promises. They’re promises to be responsive, open and vulnerable, and to persist for a while. Response carries the promise of future response: responding once is opening to response for all time, till one is out of time. Each response opens an endless possibility of revisiting and revising, re-responding to the situation or the response itself. – There is no closure.
“It is not possible to step twice into the same river.”[1]
And yet, what we learn from these beings is never something as empty as a general response, question, promise, or memory. We learn something that can’t be put to words: the particularity of this heron, this seashore, this arbutus.
We learn what it’s like for other particularities to be.
[1] Heraclitus, fr. 62, in A Presocratics Reader, p. 36.