Omar Khayyam penned the Rubaiyat, a series of quatrains about the finiteness of life, in an age when flowering praise of the afterlife and pervasive mysticism abounded in his native Persia. He was ‘regarded askance’ and dreaded by the spiritual Sufi order, because he rejected empty certainties on the eternity of the human soul and called into question the practice of abstinence from earthly pleasures. In the words of Edward Fitzgerald, the poet who translated his work and produced the most read and accessible edition of Khayyam’s original words had this to say: “Khayyam did not find any providence but destiny and any world but this.’
Khayyam truly was an intellectual and spiritual outlier in his day and his legacy remains one of shadows and enigmas. He is presented to us as an inchoate figure, a first sketch, a mystification. A sphinx-like figure whose impenetrability has furnished his appeal; indeed, the ambiguity that surrounds him has rendered him a cult-like figure in the cultural imagination.
Beneath the latticework of dense symbolism and allegorical musings is a powerful message: savour the moment, capture the present hour, inhabit your earthly existence. Some have misinterpreted Khayyam as being a fatalist and a cynic and while he certainly has tendencies of both, these are not his sole motivations. I detect in his words an urgency, a restless desperation to live, to savor, to bear witness to the unfolding of time and phenomena. He urges us to drink the wine of life, a symbol for all earthly aesthetic and intellectual pleasures.
Just as we must not regard Khayyam as a pessimistic loner, we must also avoid reading into the Rubaiyat a frenzied optimism that simply isn’t there. Though the admonition of Carpe Diem has taken on a playful, albeit trite, theme in our century this was not the case in Khayyam’s imagining of the phrase. Carpe Diem suggests that in the final analysis all distraction, engagement, and pleasure is fleeting and ultimately unfulfilling. He cautions us that while we must enjoy the various elements of life that we must not attach ourselves to any of them. We can not find salvation in them.
Perhaps the most salient takeaway for modern readers is that time is the only resource that exists for us and that it is finite and non-refundable. This should call into question how you spend your time. As Annie Dillard phrased beautifully: “how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” How are you spending your life? Are you drinking from the fountain of life, absorbing the aesthetic, auditory, and sensory pleasures of the world? Or are you needlessly abstaining in hopes of a more fulfilling tomorrow? Are you pursuing your great joys and interests or will you get to them next week? Pay heed to the hourglass for when the time has run dry, so to have your chances to renegotiate your destiny.
Selected are twenty five quatrains with significance to the themes of mortality, hedonism, and living in the moment as a necessary, radical practice.
Awake! For morning in the bowl of night Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight: And lo! The hunter of the east has caught The sultan’s turret in a noose of light
Dreaming when dawn’s left hand was in the sky I heard a voice within the tavern cry, “Awake, my little ones, and fill the cup Before life’s liquor in its cup be dry”
Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring The winter garment of repentance fling: The bird of time but has a little way to fly- And Lo! The bird is on the wing
Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough, A flask of wine, a book of verse- and thou Beside me singing in the wilderness- And wilderness is paradise now
“How sweet is mortal sovranty” – think some:
Others – “How blest the paradise to come!” Ah, take the cash in hand and waive the rest; Oh, the brave music of a distant drum!
The worldly hope men set their hearts upon Turns ashes – or it prospers; and anon, Like snow upon the desert’s dusty face Lighting a little hour or two – is gone
And those who husbanded the golden grain, And those who flung it to the winds like rain, Alike to no such aureate earth are turned As, buried once, men want dug up again
I sometimes think that never blows so red The rose as where some buried Caesar bled; That every hyacinth the garden wears Dropt in its lap from some once lovely head
Ah! My beloved, fill the cup that clears Today of past regrets and future fears- Tomorrow? – Why tomorrow I may be Myself with yesterday’s Seven thousand years
Lo! Some we loved, the loveliest and the best That time and fate of all their vintage prest, Have drunk their cup a round or two before, And one by one crept silently to rest
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, Before we too into the dust descend; Dust into dust, and under dust, to lie, Sans wine, sans song, sans singer, and -sans end!
Alike for those who for today prepare, And those that after a tomorrow stare, A muezzin from the tower of darkness cries “Fools! Your reward is neither here nor there.”
Why, all the saints and sages who discussed Of the two worlds so learnedly, are thrust Like foolish prophets forth; their words to scorn Are scattered, and their mouths are stopt with dust
Oh, Come with old Khayyam, and leave the wise To talk; one thing is certain, that life flies; One thing is certain, and the rest is lies; The flower that once has blown for ever dies
With them the seed of wisdom did I sow, And with my own hand laboured it to grow:
And this was all the harvest that I reaped- “I came like water and like wind I go”
There was a door to which I found no key: There was a veil past which I could not see: Some little talk awhile of me and thee There seemed- and then no more of thee and me
Up from earth’s center through the seventh gate I rose, and on the throne of Saturn sate, And many knots unravelled by the road; But not the knot of human death and fate
Then to this earthen bowl did I adjourn My lip the secret well of life to learn: And lip to lip it murmured – “While you live, Drink! – for once dead you never shall return”
Ah, fill the cup: – what boots it to repeat How time is slipping underneath our feet: Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday, Why fret about them if today be sweet!
One moment in annihilation’s waste, One moment, of the Well of Life to taste- The stars are setting, and the caravan Starts for the dawn of nothing- oh, make haste!
For in and out, above, about, below Tis nothing but a magic shadow-show, Played in a box whose candle is the sun, Round which we phantom figures come and go
Tis all a chequer-board of nights and days Where destiny with men for pieces plays: Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays, And one by one back in the closet lays
The moving finger writes; and having writ, Moves on: nor all thy piety or thy wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it
Alas, that spring should vanish with the rose! That youth’s sweet scented manuscript should close! The nightingale that in the branches sang, Ah, whence, and whither flown again, Who knows!
Ah, love! Could thou and I with fate conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits-and then Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire
