It seems that, against the age-old controversies between specialists, it stems from the source of the river Breg, but the water that irrigates the meadow from which the Breg rises comes from a pipe, planted straight into the ground.
An old woman who lives in a house on top of the meadow has attached a hollow trunk to the pipe, which forms a kind of gutter. Is it therefore necessary to conclude that the Danube originates from a gutter? In this matter the first foundation is missing, the base that holds everything together; even the gutter that feeds the spring is fed by the spring]
Anonymous
The Danube that both is and is not, that is born in several places of several parents, reminds us that, thanks to the complex, hidden fabric to which we owe our existence, each of us is a Noteentiendo [a form of not understanding you], as are the people from Prague with German names or the Viennese with Czech ones. But on this evening, along the river which they tell us sometimes disappears in summer, the step which treads with mine is as unmistakable as that watercourse, and in the flow of it, as I follow the curve of the banks, perhaps I know who I am.
Claudio Magris, Danube, 1986
What if we are looking for the source of a river and we find out that it is a gutter, collecting rainwater?
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When governments pursue growth as a goal in itself, they undertake desperate and damaging measures to make it happen. They chase cheap energy and keep issuing licences for fossil fuels and opening coal mines. They say they're cutting red tape in the name of business innovation, but they end up unde …
What captured our attention
We chose this passage because it tells a beautiful story that resonates with us and invites us to question the very nature of "origin"—a concept that, as this narrative reveals, can be deeply misleading and elusive.
“Origin” is something we constantly try to find, to pin down, as if it could reveal the primal nature or essence of something. But just as the Danube's scholars found, every origin we identify seems only to lead us further back, to something deeper that escapes us like the waters of a river. This narrative about the search for the first source of the Danube reveals how scholars, in their pursuit, end up wandering in a maze of directions, arriving at a surprising discovery that completely reshapes the idea of origin itself: the water of the Danube stems from rainwater collected in a gutter—an artificial, secondary collection of waters from diverse places. This discovery powerfully illustrates that origins can be composed and interconnected rather than singular and pure. In fact, we cannot truly know where these waters originate from, since in the process of evaporation, condensation, and movement, they could have been gathered from anywhere, containing particles from countless locations.
This surprising explanation of the Danube’s source reveals the paradox at the heart of any search for origins: rather than a single, pure beginning, origins are layered, complex and inherently elusive—constructs woven from countless elements across time and space.
