race of the river: a preface

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I’m going to quote Heidegger from his 1931-38 Notebooks at length, but let me begin this way: What’s more interesting: where a river is going or where it’s been?

It’s going somewhere because it’s drawn to do so—by gravity, of course—not because it’s coming from somewhere.

Likewise with lives: Actualization of potential goes where it can, in its best interest. It doesn’t unfold a destiny. The human interest isn’t Given. It’s not primordially about its past, rather about its futurity, because interests, too, develop with the life. One is transformed along the way, and the character of interest in going further is transformed too—if potential and futurity orient the way, rather than attachment to notions of inevitability of a given past—or lost past to be regained.