A river runs through it

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.

Never having read the book (A river runs through it), I had always interpreted this enigmatic line as a cynical summation of the futility of human endeavor, the illusion of every man’s uniqueness and the inevitability of Death. Sadly, this thought never depressed me and I was impressed by the wit that put it so succinctly.

Actually, the concluding paragraph of the book goes:

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

Watching Robert Redford’s adaptation of the novella, hearing Redford narrate those lines (wonderfully, I must say), I realized that it had never been about any of those things that I had thought it had.

The river here, is a metaphor for life. And life isn’t just a chronicle of a single person but the entwinement of every facet of each individual’s tale. It is a sum of all our experiences, a pool from which each of us draw from ceaselessly and yet would never empty. It is in this sense, a river. A river replenished cyclically by each of its rivulets.

There probably isn’t a more fitting tribute to life.

On a related note, this poem by Chandrashekhar Patil (titled aptly, Guptagamini) seems to me the perfect echo of Norman Mclean’s words.