The Same River

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.”

Many years ago I attended a film screening at the University Film Archives at U.C. Berkeley. Having recently discovered the poetry and personality of Fernando Pessoa, I was interested in almost anything Portuguese, and this film attracted me.

I have searched for it many times since then but have never been able to find it again. I cannot remember the title. I know almost nothing about it except the feeling it left behind.

At the beginning of the film appeared a quote from Heraclitus:

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.”

That thought has remained with me for decades.

At the time I knew little of Portuguese history. As the years passed and my own connection to Portugal deepened, the film became more meaningful in memory than it even was when I first saw it.
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The story concerned a group of friends tied to the underground artistic resistance to the Salazar regime, a generation shaped by exile, political repression, and the leaving behind of Lisbon by many young artists and intellectuals. After the suicide of one of their friends, the group reunites years later. One of them tries to understand who the others have become in his absence from Portugal.

I remember very little else. Yet the emotional atmosphere of the film never left me.

Now, in advanced age, I realize how profoundly true Heraclitus’ words are. If one lives long enough, one may pass through many different lives while still carrying the same name and face. Entire worlds disappear. Places change. Friendships alter. Countries reinvent themselves. Even our own inner landscape becomes unfamiliar.

You cannot truly go back.

And if you do return, neither you nor the place is the same.

Perhaps that is why certain objects become so important to us.

Years ago, while helping stage a house for a jazz-loving friend, I found an old image on tin in a vintage shop on College Avenue in Oakland. It showed a wild-looking pianist at the keyboard beneath the words “Alcazar d’Été — Fragson.” I knew nothing about it, yet it spoke to me immediately. I bought it and hung it on my wall, where it has remained for nearly fifteen years.

During various purges and reorganizations of my life, I never let it go.

It felt somehow like a friend.

Only recently did I finally look up its history. It was a famous poster by the French artist Adrien Barrère depicting the music hall entertainer Harry Fragson, a performer beloved in Paris in the years before the First World War. Fragson himself lived a tragic life and died violently at the hands of his mentally disturbed father.

Yet none of that was what first reached me.

What reached me was the spirit inside the image: the raw theatrical energy, the melancholy beneath performance, the sense of another vanished world still somehow alive.

It is strange the things we live beside for years without fully understanding. We only know they matter.

If you live long enough, you begin to realize that much of life cannot truly be recovered.

The worlds we loved vanish even while we are still alive to remember them.

Yet somehow we continue carrying fragments forward: a voice, an image, a sentence from a forgotten film, the face of a pianist from another century pounding at a piano beneath the lights of Paris.

We gather these fragments almost without knowing why.

Perhaps because they reassure us that although the river keeps moving, something in us still remembers having once stood on its shore.

Not the same river.

Not the same city.

Not the same life.
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And yet something essential continues traveling beside us, quietly recognizing itself across time.
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