Omar Khayyam
Ouote Fenn from his, My War And Me writing:
So, in my mind the lines have converged to tell a story that satisfies me in my heart, where only there it really counts. I justify expressing my thoughts here because they have been pounding at me for so long. I certainly can’t identify all of the strings as they spin the web that forms the latent beliefs that brought me here, but these are some:
I borrow now from Omar Khayyam, who died in the first quarter of the twelfth century. His words are some of those that tell the insidious stories the best, stories that have made me think:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
Alike for those who for To-day prepare,
And those that after some To-MORROW stare,
A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries,
“Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There.
There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I may not see:
Some little talk a while of Me and Thee
There was – and then no more of Thee and Me.
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.
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I love that thought because it says so much to me.
End of quoting Fenn.
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Khayyam was much more than a poet and writer of popular folk sayings of his time.
(18 May 1048 – 4 December 1131) Khayyam was a Persian polymath, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet. The man had to have been a true genius.
In the introduction to his Treatise on, Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, Khayyam himself described the difficulties for men of learning during his life time.
"I was unable to devote myself to the learning pf this algebra and the continued concentration upon it, because of obstacles in the vagaries of time which hindered me, for we have been deprived of all the people of knowledge save for a group, small in number, with many troubles, whose concern in life is to snatch the opportunity, when time is asleep,to devote themselves meanwhile to the investigation and perfection of a science; for the majority of people who imitate philosophers, confuse the true with the false, and they do nothing but deceive and pretend knowledge, and they do not use what of the sciences except for base and material purposes; and if they see certain person seeking for the right and preferring the truth doing his best to refute the false and untrue and leaving aside hypocrisy and deceit, the make a fool of him and mock him."
Outside the world of mathematics, Khayyam is best known as a result of Edward Fitzgerald's popular translation in 1859 of nearly 600 short four line poems the Rubaiyat.
Care to guess which one of nearly 600 short four linw poems is the most popular?
