Author: Donald S. Yarab

Thinking new things every day

On Democritus and the Practice of Intellectual Renewal

Time seems to pass with increasing alacrity as age advances, perhaps because the days are rarely idle. This month alone has been filled with reading—books, articles, essays, plays, and poems—alongside listening to unfamiliar musical compositions, writing both essays and poems, exploring sculpture, art, and artists to whom I had not earlier been exposed, and even watching a film or two new to me. In parallel, several projects occupy my attention, some practicable, others less so.

Among the works read recently, as part of a larger and deliberately sustained program of reading, was The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus (Fragments: A Text and Translation with a Commentary) by C. C. W. Taylor. The terrain was at once familiar and difficult—as all serious thought invariably is. Yet one fragment, attributed to Democritus, stood out precisely because of its simplicity. Fragment D3, rendered in Greek as νέα ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ φρονῶντες and translated as “Thinking new things every day,” resonated with unexpected force.

The maxim requires little exegesis. It does not strain toward profundity, nor does it announce itself with philosophical grandeur. And yet it gestures toward a way of living that is both demanding and humane. To think new things each day is not merely to accumulate novelty, but to cultivate receptivity: to ensure that the mind does not calcify, that attention remains alert, that experience continues to provoke reflection.

One might imagine how much more open, thoughtful, and richly inhabited our lives would be if we deliberately set aside even a small portion of each day—ten minutes, perhaps, or an hour, as circumstances allow—to encounter something new. Whether through reading, art, music, film, playfulness, or creative expression of one’s own, the discipline of daily intellectual renewal is no small thing. It is, in the Democritean sense, a commitment not merely to activity, but to the practice of vitality of mind itself.

Sans Tempo

A note—
E, D, C♯—
held, not going anywhere.

The rose at the window—
petal and spiral,
not in stages.

The notes fall like sand—
broken,
and whole.

Blaspheme

Lips spit: I am the chosen one. I am the way. I am law—
by force alone I shatter.

Men bow—dirty knees, tongues lapping gilt from the calf.

Sacrifice: tablets, inheritance, will.

Ecstatic Murmuring

Westbound on Detroit Road,
Thursday afternoon—
the sun at last undoing
what the week of hard cold had locked,
wind finding purchase
in limbs long held numb.

At the light, I was made still
beneath the oaks that rise above the church,
their upper branches clearing the roofline,
where dozens—perhaps hundreds—
of narrow arms were lifted,
bending back, then forward again,

not in time,
not together,
yet not alone—
each answering the wind
along its own brief arc.

I searched for the word:
rhythmic—too orderly;
swaying—too mild;
dancing—too deliberate.

No.
This was something else.

An ecstatic murmuring—
as of congregants when a current passes through them,
not taught, not rehearsed,
each moved according to its measure,
yet taken up into one trembling praise
of what simply is.

The light changed.
The branches did not stop.

Night Reading

The poem finally opened itself:
after readings enough, I saw
how the line broke, why
that word and not another.

The pleasure—self forgotten
in attending, briefly lodged
in someone else’s precision,
language doing its work.

Book to shelf. Poem to page.
The body turns to its ablutions:
water, soap, the day undone.

I glance up at the mirror—
it will not hold image.

Water still running. My hands, still wet, suspended.
The book already distant on its shelf,
the lines loosening, unheld.