Sunday, December 4, 2016

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: Second Edition, Quatrain LXXX

Quatrain  LXXX is linked closely to the previous quatrain, LXXIX.

Second Edition:  Quatrain LXXIX

With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man knead,
And there of the Last Harvast sow'd the seed:
     And the first Morning of Creation wrote
What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.


As you can see, the previous quatrain leads directly to today's quatrain. 



Second Edition:  Quatrain LXXX

Yesterday, This Day's Madness did prepare:
To-morrow's Silence, Triumph, or Despair:
    Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why:
Drink!  for you know not why you go, nor where.




Fifth Edition:  Quatrain LXXIV

Yesterday This Day's Madness did prepare;
To-morrow's Silence, Triumph, or Despair:
    Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why:
Drink!  for you know not why you go, nor where.


Aside from two punctuation changes, a dropped comma after "Yesterday," and the substitution of a semi-colon for a colon after "prepare" (which may have simply been a typesetter's errors), the two versions are the same.

The first two lines bring out a theme that has appeared before this--that of causality.  Today's events or happenings are the result of what happened in the past and will inevitably lead to future consequences.   This suggests predestination or a deterministic universe.   The first two lines still leave the past free if you want to see it that way.  Others may argue for an unbroken chain of events going back to . . .?   On  the other hand, to complicate the issue, we can always bring in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Chaos Theory which many now see as refuting any theory of a deterministic universe.

The last two lines restate a very familiar theme:  we don't know where we came from and we don't know where we are going, and we don't know why we are here.  This, of course, strikes directly into the heart of most religions whose basis for their existence is that THEY know all the answers.  The Poet/Narrator clearly has some doubts about this, which he has stated many times throughout the poem.  


10 comments:

  1. The word "madness" arrests my attention. Is that a cynical, existential view? I don't know what to make of anything in the verse beyond that word. Such is my frame of mind today. More anon.

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    1. R.T.,

      Your focus on "madness" caused me to take another look at the quatrain. Amazing! I think this quatrain, more than any of the other quatrains, really is appropriate for today, for now. Today's madness will bring Whose triumph? Whose despair? Whose Silence?

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  2. Tim: perceptive of you... i sometimes forget you were a cryptologist - that explains your acuity... i'm reminded of the many sci fi novels that work off the concept of parallel universes resulting from arbitrary splits in the time stream at crucial points; usually leading to the question, "what might have happened if..." implying variant cosmoses with infinitely different characteristics...

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    1. Mudpuddle,

      Some cosmological theories now include parallel universes, although they are vague as what they are like.

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  3. Great post Fred.

    One things that strikes me is the universality of these themes. Present day philosophers and physicists are still pondering issues such as causation, predestination, etc.

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    1. Brian Joseph,

      It's almost as though they are hardwired in the human brain.

      I think it was Aldous Huxley who called them perennial questions because they've been around forever, or almost that long. And, they've still received no answers that satisfy everybody.

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    2. CERN might change things sometime; or maybe not... if nothing else, the development of quantum mechanics has spawned a whole new generation of speculation and hypothesis - making among scientists and interested lay persons, the fruit of which should appear in journals and sci fi novels in the immediate future, one would think..

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    3. Mudpuddle,

      Parallel universes have been "explored" in SF for some time now, although some times they show up as time travel tales. It will be interesting when CERN results start to have an effect on cosmological theories, which will then reappear in SF stories in the future.

      I'm looking forward, and I gather many cosmologists are also, to reading about the discovery of new, unexpected, and inexplicable particles with strange attributes.

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