The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: Second Edition, Quatrain LXVII

This is another of the quatrains Edward FitzGerald added to the Second Edition.


SECOND EDITION:  QUATRAIN LXVII

Strange, is it not?  that of the myriads who
Before us pass'd the door of Darkness through,
    Not one returns to tell us of the Road,
Which to discover we must travel too.





FIFTH EDITION:  QUATRAIN LXIV
 
Strange, is it not?  that of the myriads who
Before us pass'd the door of Darkness through,
    Not one returns to tell us of the Road,
Which to discover we must travel too.


The two quatrains of the Second and the Fifth Editions are identical.  I can find no changes, even minor punctuation changes.  I guess FitzGerald thought he got it right the first time.

The point is clear, nobody has come back after death to tell us what actually happens.  I often hear others today discuss smugly how we moderns are so much wiser and more sophisticated than people living centuries earlier, that they believed all sorts of superstitions and had so many silly ideas about the universe. 

Perhaps somebody should point out that Khayyam seems far more skeptical than our contemporaries who believe in channelers and mediums who claim to be in contact with the dead and can bring their words to us, one or more of whom even had a TV series in which they "contacted" the spirits of those gone on before.  I think he would be equally skeptical of those who claim to hear the voices of the dead on tape recorders set on RECORD and left running in a empty room.


We may have eliminated or almost eliminated several diseases, but we haven't even begun to deal with gullibility.  And, I won't say a word about presidential aspirants and their followers.