As to how the pleasures of life are to be found, men never have agreed and never can. Our view of pleasure, like our feelings and emotions, grows from the condition of our being, and is the result of causes that we did not create and cannot control. Some there are who look at all the strife and suffering of the world, and feel no kinship to the great, surging mass that moves and feels and thinks. These walk silently along the path alone, oblivious alike to the pleasures and the sufferings of the world around. Others there are whose souls are so sensitive that they feel the joys and sorrows of the world, and who cannot separate their lives from all the sentient, moving things that teem and swarm upon the earth. Both can and must feel those appetites and desires that are ever incident to being. Without these, nature could neither bring life upon the earth nor sustain it when it came. It is in the balancing of these feelings that nature almost necessarily makes the imperfect man. Unless the emotions and desires are sufficiently developed, the creature is cold, impassive, pulseless clay. If too much developed, it runs the risk of sacrificing the higher emotions and more lasting enjoyments to the fleeting, sensual pleasures of the hour. Almost every person must stand upon one side or the other of this shadowy line, which no man can see, and which he would have no power to cross, even if he knew where it ran.
Perhaps the Rubaiyat shows too much leaning toward the sensual; too great fondness for the vine. Some of the allusions were perhaps symbolical, but still, Omar doubtless was very fond of wine and found in its use one of the chief purposes of life. Philosophy and theology could not satisfy his mind. These furnished only visionary, inconsistent theories of existence, utterly barren and futile,—wholly purposeless and wrong. After studying and wrangling and disputing, he threw them to the winds and reached out for the realities,—however transitory and unsatisfactory these realities seemed to be. His exchange of theories and mysticisms for wine may be symbolical or not, but whether literal or figurative, he could hardly be cheated by the trade. This is the way he relates the story of his change of heart:
You know, My Friends, with what a brave Carouse
I made a Second Marriage in my house;
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,
And took the Daughter of the Vine to spouse.
After throwing the theoretical philosophy to the winds, he turned to the vine to learn what life really meant. No doubt, the vessel here is figuratively used. It might mean a wine cup, it might mean feeding a beggar, it might mean a warm room and comfortable dress. It meant something besides the intangible, barren theories, which have ever furnished theologians and professors with the pleasing occupation of splitting hairs and quibbling about the meaning of terms.
Then to the Lip of this poor earthen Urn
I lean’d, the secret of my Life to learn;
And Lip to Lip it murmur’d—“While you live,