Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535 - 475 BC)
An ancient Greek materialist philosopher, one of the largest representatives of the Ionian school of philosophy. Fire was the origin of all things. Creator of the concept of continuous change, the doctrine of "logos", which he interpreted as "god", "fate", "necessity", "eternity". He owns the famous saying
"You can't step into the same river twice."

Along with Pythagoras and Parmenides, Heraclitus determined the foundations of ancient and all European philosophy. Heraclitus considered being itself as a mystery, a riddle.

A native of Ephesus, he belonged to an ancient aristocratic family, dating back to the founder of Ephesus, Androclus. Due to his origin, he had a number of "royal" privileges and a hereditary priesthood at the temple of Artemis of Ephesus. However, at that time, power in Ephesus no longer belonged to aristocrats.

The philosopher did not participate in public life, abandoned his titles, spoke sharply negatively about the city's order and contemptuously treated the "crowd". He considered the laws of the city so hopelessly bad that he refused his fellow citizens a request for new ones, noting that it was better to play with children than to participate in public affairs.

Heraclitus did not leave Ephesus and refused the invitations of the Athenians and the Persian king Darius

The main work of the philosopher - the book "On Nature" has been preserved in fragments. It consists of three parts: about nature, about the state and about God, and is distinguished by originality, figurativeness and aphoristic language. The basic idea is that nothing in nature is permanent. Everything is like the movement of a river that cannot be entered twice. One constantly passes into another, changing its state.

The symbolic expression of universal change for Heraclitus is fire. Fire is continuous self-destruction; he lives by his death.

Heraclitus introduced a new philosophical concept - logos (word), meaning by this the principle of the reasonable unity of the world, which orders the world by mixing opposite principles Opposites are in eternal struggle, giving rise to new phenomena (“discord is the father of everything”). The human mind and logos have a common nature, but the logos exists in eternity and governs the cosmos, of which man is a particle.

Tradition has preserved the image of Heraclitus - a lonely sage who despised people (and those who were famous for wisdom) for not understanding what they themselves say and do.

His sayings are often like folklore riddles or the words of an oracle, which, according to Heraclitus, "does not speak, and does not hide, but gives signs." It is believed that by writing his work deliberately obscure and giving it to the temple of Artemis for safekeeping, Heraclitus seemed to want to protect him from the ignorant crowd.

Sayings of Heraclitus reveal a thoughtful structure, a special poetics. They are saturated with alliterations, a play on words, characteristic of the structure of inner speech, addressed not so much to others as to oneself, ready to return to the element of thinking silence.

To be, according to Heraclitus, means to constantly become, to flow from form to form, to be renewed, just as the same river carries new and new waters. Another metaphor for being is in Heraclitus burning, fire. A single being, as it were, flares up with a multitude of things that exist, but it also goes out in it, just as the things that exist, flaming up with being, go out in its unity. Another metaphor for the same is the game: every time a new game of the same game.

American science fiction writer Ray Bradbury died in Los Angeles on June 6, 2012 at the age of 92.. Without a doubt, we can say that an entire era has gone with him. Bradbury himself spoke of death like this:

“I don’t think about death, because I will always be here. This box with my films and shelves with my books convince me that I have a hundred or two years left.”

It is true that every writer has his own talent. Ray Bradbury, for example, had a unique memory. Here is how he describes it himself: I have always had what I would call an "almost complete mental regression" to the hour of birth. I remember cutting the umbilical cord, I remember the first time I sucked my mother's breast. The nightmares that usually lie in wait for a newborn are listed in my mental cheat sheet from the very first weeks of life. I know, I know that it's impossible, most people don't remember anything like that... But I saw, heard, knew...". He clearly remembers the first snowfall in his life. A later memory is about how his parents, still three, took him to the cinema for the first time. There was a sensational silent film "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" with Lon Chaney in leading role, and the image of the freak struck little Ray to the core.

Ray Bradbury formally completed his education at school level without even going to college. Even as a child, Bradbury realized that he wanted to become a writer, and was seriously engaged in only this one thing. In one of the interviews, to the question: "In At what age did you start writing?- he answers: " At twelve. I couldn't afford to buy the Edgar Burroughs sequel to Martian Warrior because we were poor family...and then wrote my own version".

For lack of other means of subsistence, the future classic worked as a newspaper peddler. He ran through the streets screaming " Latest news!" for a good four years, while simultaneously inventing new stories, observing people, noticing vivid details. Here is what Ray Bradberry himself says about that period:

« In the senior classes of the school where I studied, an anthology was conducted - students wrote short essays about themselves. There was nothing of mine there - I could not put down two words on paper.

That's how I graduated from high school. I went out into the world a helpless being, knowing only one thing for sure: I want to be a writer.

And I got a job at a newsstand. And friends passed by and asked: "What are you doing here?" And I answered them: I become a writer.

“How can they become a writer standing here?”

That's how. Every morning when I wake up I write short story. And after work, he did not go home, but to the library. I lived in the library. I was surrounded by the best lovers in the world - they were books.

Rudyard Kipling loved me. Charles Dickens loved me. H. G. Wells loved me. Jules Verne loved me.
These lovers changed my life. They were staring at me. When you entered the library, you fell into an amazing atmosphere, you breathed it in, you swam in it. You became a writer by swimming in the middle of a library. And vibrations passed through you. They stay with you forever.

I didn't think about how little I can do. I was so consumed with love for the books on the shelves that I simply had no time to think about my own imperfections.

After all, what is the power of love? Love makes you sound even after the music is over.

That is why one must constantly be in a state of being in love with something. In my case, in the library, in books, in writing. Even if what you write yourself is terrible, you ruthlessly throw away what you have written and start with a clean slate.

You see, I was twenty-two years old when I wrote my first decent story. I was sitting at the typewriter, and when I finished it, tears ran down my cheeks.

In his early experiments, he copied the pompous Victorian prose style of Edgar Allan Poe until Henry Kuttner, one of the writers Bradbury besieged in an effort to show the work, told him: Write another story like this and I'll kill you."

Bradbury later said: Jules Verne was my father. Wells is a wise uncle. Edgar Allan Poe was my cousin; he's like bat- always lived in our dark attic. Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers are my brothers and comrades. Here is all my family. I'll also add that my mother, in all likelihood, was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein. Well, who else could I become, if not a science fiction writer with such a family.»

In Ray Bradbury's office, the car number F-451 is nailed to the wall, despite the fact that he himself has never sat behind the wheel. The reason for this was that even as a young Bradbury he saw with his own eyes two terrible car accidents. During one of them, he was next to a broken car and met the eyes of a mutilated, but still alive woman. On that day, the boy fell ill from the experience. A terrible impression remained with the writer forever. But Ray Bradbury put absolutely all the impressions, both good and bad, into his writer's piggy bank:

"There is no fruitful formula by which science fiction is written, and indeed any literature in general. A real writer writes because he feels a need, a need, a thirst to write, because literature awakens in him the highest joy, passion, pleasure, delight - name it he lives, at any rate he must live, by his passion, and passion is incompatible with formulas.

Here is a good example - my story "Pedestrian". When I went for a walk at night, I was often detained for walking. It pissed me off and I wrote a story about a future world where everyone who dares to walk around the city at night is declared a criminal.

Bradbury talks a lot about the process of writing in his essay "The Joy of Writing":

“The writer should be feverish with excitement and delight. If this is not the case, let him work in the air, pick peaches or dig ditches; God knows, these activities are more beneficial for health.

How long ago did you write a story where your sincere love or true hatred is manifested? When was the last time you plucked up the courage to release a beast of prey on the pages of your manuscript? What is the best and worst thing in your life, and when will you finally shout or whisper both?

Well, isn't it wonderful, for example, to throw on the table the copy of Harper's Bazaar that you leafed through in the waiting room and the dentist, rush to your typewriter and attack with cheerful anger at the shockingly stupid snobbery of this magazine? This is exactly what I did a few years ago. I came across a number where the Bazaar photographers, with their upside-down notions of equality, once again used someone, this time from the Puerto Rican slums, as the backdrop against which such emaciated-looking fashion models from the best salons in the country were photographed. for even thinner half-women of high society. These pictures made me so furious that I rushed to the typewriter and in one sitting dashed off "Sun and Shadow", a story about an old Puerto Rican who, by standing in each frame and lowering his pants, reduces the work of the Bazaar to nothing for the photographers of the Bazaar.
When was the last time you, like me, wrote a story just out of indignation?

What do you love the most in the world? I'm talking about things, small or big. Maybe a tram, or a pair of tennis shoes? Long ago, when we were children, these things were magical for us. Last year I published a story about how a boy rides a tram for the last time. The tram smells like summer thunderstorms and lightning, its seats look like cool green moss, but it is doomed to give way to a more prosaic, less romantic smelling bus.

It is not at all necessary that the flame be large. A small light, such as that of a burning candle, is quite enough: longing for a magical car, like a tram, or for magical animals, like a pair of tennis shoes that jump like rabbits on the grass. early morning. Try to find small delights for yourself, look for small sorrows, and give form to both. Taste them, give your typewriter a taste too. When was the last time you read a book of poetry or, sometime in the evening, did you choose time for one or two essays? Have you read, for example, one issue of Geriatrics, the journal of the American Geriatric Society devoted to "the study and clinical study of disease and physiological processes in the aged and aging"? Ridiculous? May be. But ideas are everywhere, like apples that fall from a tree and disappear into the grass, when there are no travelers who can see and feel the beauty - well-mannered, terrifying or ridiculous.