I was lying in bed the other night, struggling to get to sleep, when out of nowhere a poem popped into my mind. It was one I’d learned off by heart at school by the Ancient Greek poet Callimachus. I wouldn’t want you to think that I habitually spout poetry to myself at night, as I most certainly don’t – and particularly not in a dead language! It was clearly my subconscious trying to get a message across to me. I’ll spare you the original Greek verse. My own very rusty and distinctly free translation of it goes something like this:
Someone told me of your death, Heraclitus. It brought tears to my eyes. I remembered the many times that you and I had sat up talking late into the night. But now you, my dear friend from Halicarnassos, have been a pile of ashes for a long time. And yet your poems live on still. Death, which seizes everything, cannot lay its hands on those.
It struck me quite forcibly that if you changed the names, Heraclitus/ Christopher, Halicarnassus/ Malvern; and updated “poems” to “blog posts and/or Librivox recordings”, then the same sentiments are as true today as they were over 2000 years ago. That was an interesting and surprisingly comforting insight to have in the middle of the night.
