All Rivers Run to the Sea

Ecclesiastes is the most honest book of wisdom in the Hebrew Bible. Qoheleth, the Preacher, surveys the cycles of the natural world and finds in them not futility, as is often said, but pattern. The sun rises and sets. The wind makes its circuits. The rivers run to the sea and the sea returns the water as rain.

This is not nihilism. This is the river seen from a great height. From close up, each waterfall seems like an ending. From far enough above, you can see that the water that went over the waterfall is now moving downstream, will reach the sea, will become cloud, will become rain, will become river again. The circuit is complete. Nothing is lost.

Watts’s torch-passing teaching and Qoheleth’s river are the same observation. One generation passes away and another comes. The torch moves from hand to hand. The river flows from source to sea and back.

The Stoics called this ekpyrosis, the periodic return of all things to the fire and their re-emergence in new forms. The Hindus call it the breath of Brahma. Watts called it the cosmic game. Qoheleth called it vanity, but vanity in Hebrew, hevel, means breath. Vapor. Something real but not solid. Something that moves and changes and cannot be held.

The next verse turns the same observation inward. The rivers never fill the sea, and the eye is never satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Qoheleth sets the cycles of nature and the appetite of the senses side by side and finds the same pattern in both: what keeps arriving never completes anything. The Edge’s first Inquiry, on hedonic adaptation, takes its title from this teaching.