Omar Khayyám

The tedium of Khayyám isn’t the tedium of those who, because they don’t know how to do anything, naturally don’t know what to do. This tedium belongs to those who were born dead and who understandably turn to morphine or cocaine. The tedium of the Persian sage is more noble and profound. It’s the tedium of one who clearly considered and saw that everything was obscure, of one who took stock of all the religions and philosophies and said, like Solomon: ‘I saw that all was vanity and vexation of spirit.’ Or in the words of another king, the emperor Septimus Severus, when he said farewell to power and the world: ‘Omnia fui, nihil expedit.’ ‘I’ve been everything; nothing’s worth the trouble.’

Life, according to Tarde,* is the search for the impossible by way of the useless, which is what Omar Khayyám would have said, if he had said it.

That’s why the Persian insists on the use of wine. ‘Drink! Drink!’ sums up his practical philosophy. It’s not the kind of drinking inspired by happiness, which drinks to become even happier, more itself. Nor is it the drinking inspired by despair, which drinks to forget, to be less itself. Happiness adds vigour and love to the wine, and in Khayyám we find no note of energy, no words of love. The wispy, gracile figure of Sáki appears only occasionally in the Rubáiyát, and she is merely ‘the girl who serves the wine’. The poet appreciates her elegant shape as he appreciated the shape of the amphora containing the wine.

Dean Aldrich* is an example of how happiness speaks of wine:

If all be true that I do think, There are five reasons we should drink; Good wine – a friend – or being dry – Or lest we should be by and by – Or any other reason why.

The practical philosophy of Khayyám is essentially a mild form of Epicureanism, with only a slight trace of desire for pleasure. To see roses and drink wine is enough for him. A gentle breeze, a conversation without point or purpose, a cup of wine, flowers – in this, and in nothing else, the Persian sage places his highest desire. Love agitates and wearies, action dissipates and comes to nothing, no one knows how to know, and to think muddles everything. Better to cease from desire and hope, from the futile pretension of explaining the world, and from the foolish ambition of improving or governing it. Everything is nothing, or, as recorded in The Greek Anthology, ‘All that exists comes from unreason.’ And it was a Greek,* hence a rational soul, who said it.