A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
By some calculations the Persian mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, poet and Sufi Omar Khayyam was born on this day in 1131.
In my youth I was very much taken with what I only later learned was Edward FitzGerald’s controversial loose translation of parts of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat. Later, when I was working at Holmes’ Book Company in downtown Oakland (a great store of beloved memory) for months my lunch breaks were taken up with reading various translations side by side of the quatrains that FitzGerald had first interpreted.
I gather there’s some controversy around his spirituality, but it seems fairly clear to me Omar Khayyam was a Sufi and a mystic. The fact that bars are named for him is simply an example of how people mistake the metaphors of his spiritual tradition, particularly about wine and intoxication.
I’m sure those early readings helped prepare me to respond when I finally found the traditions that would open my heart.
And so I remain forever grateful…
(the illustration is by Niroot Puttapipat)
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