Would God punish us for tasting certain of the pleasures that He created?
Second Edition: Quatrain LXXXIV
What! out of senseless Nothing to provoke
A conscious Something to resent the yoke
Of unpermitted Pleasure, under pain
Of Everlasting Penalties, if broke!
Fifth Edition: Quatrain LXXVIII
What! out of senseless Nothing to provoke
A conscious Something to resent the yoke
Of unpermitted Pleasure, under pain
Of Everlasting Penalties, if broke!
After adding this quatrain to the second edition, FitzGerald left it as it was, unchanged through the next three editions.
His point seems fairly straight forward, at least to me anyway. God creates us from nothing and then provokes us by forbidding certain pleasures that He Himself placed in our path. The penalty seems cruel and unjust in that it will be everlasting. The tone, actually, strikes me as indignation, more than anything else: the unfairness of it all.
Is this why God created us, brought us out of nothingness in order to punish us eternally for violating some arbitrary rules? If this is an accurate translation and not slanted by FitzGerald's own religious beliefs, then I can see why Omar Khayyam was a controversial figure in his time and afterwards. Part of the problem is that scholars suspect that a number of the quatrains in The Rubaiyat attributed to him were actually written later by others.
In any case, whoever is responsible for this quatrain has asked an interesting question, and one that will be answered solely based on one's own beliefs.
I wonder which pleasures are not permitted. And I suspect I am doomed. Does each quatrain stand by itself? Would context help here? I also sense the tone of the Torah. No surprise there given cultural contexts? And a dollop of medieval Christianity bubbles up in the mix.
ReplyDeleteR.T.,
DeleteDepends upon the god, I suppose: beef, pork, alcohol, sex outside of marriage, dancing, card playing. . .all these have been banned at one time by various deities.
Some quatrains stand alone, while others are part of a short series.
my grampa loved to say to us kids: "what's bad for you is good for you and what's good for you is bad for you"... a succinct expression of the Protestant ethic, i think...
ReplyDeleteMudpuddle,
DeleteChuckle . . .
Your Grampa sounds like my Grandma, who used to say when we were sick that we shouldn't worry about dying because we haven't suffered enough.
On other occasions when we were sick she would reassure us with--don't worry, you won't die, only the good die young.
The worse the medicine tastes, the better it is for you. I think it was Mencken who said that a Puritan is someone who fears that somewhere somebody is having fun.
LOL very good... without many books or newspapers around, the oldsters had to make up their own aphorisms... pointed and pithy most of them were/are....
DeleteMudpuddle,
DeleteYes, and those are the aphorisms we now read and quote.