No. 105

I passed a potter’s workshop yesterday,
From dust he shaped his craft from yielding clay.
I saw—though heedless eyes perceived it not—
The earth of fathers in each potter’s palm at play.^*

Philosophical Reflection

This quatrain captures one of Khayyam’s most haunting images: the potter shaping clay that was once human life. The opening line appears casual — a simple walk past a workshop — yet the setting becomes a site of revelation. The potter’s art, beautiful and ordinary, is grounded in earth. But what is this earth?

The second line draws attention to transformation. Dust becomes vessel; formless matter becomes crafted shape. The act is creative, almost divine in miniature. Yet Khayyam’s attention shifts not to the artistry itself, but to the substance being worked.

In the third line, he marks a distinction between perception and awareness. “I saw—though heedless eyes perceived it not.” The insight is not available to everyone. What appears to most as neutral clay reveals to the reflective mind a deeper truth: this soil once bore life. The earth in the potter’s hands may well contain the remains of ancestors — fathers, mothers, generations forgotten. Mortality is not abstract; it is tactile.

The final image is quietly devastating. The clay turning on the wheel carries the dust of those who once walked, spoke, loved, and ruled. The potter’s palm becomes a place where past lives are reshaped without memory. The boundary between the living and the dead dissolves. Matter recirculates; identity does not.

This quatrain belongs centrally to Time & Impermanence, with strong resonance in Ontology and Mortality. It aligns closely with Treatise on Being, which questions the persistence of identity through material change, and with Necessity of Contradiction in the World, Determinism, and Immortality, where continuity of matter contrasts with the disappearance of self. It also echoes the broader reflections on earthly return found throughout Khayyam’s philosophical writings.

The potter’s wheel becomes a silent symbol of the world itself — turning, reshaping, indifferent. What was once a person becomes a vessel; what is now a vessel will one day return to dust again. Khayyam’s insight is not morbid, but lucid. To recognise that we are shaped from those before us is to understand that we too will become the substance of future forms. In that awareness lies a sober, unembellished truth: permanence belongs to matter, not to the names we bear.

Footnote

* Source: Trabkhaneh, Homaei, no. 105, translated by Kam Austine for the book Philosophy in Verse

Related Treatises:
Treatise on Being
Necessity of Contradiction in the World, Determinism, and Immortality
Treatise on the General Properties of Existence

Internal Themes: #Impermanence #Mortality #Ontology #MaterialContinuity

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Published as part of the Philosophy in Verse Series — under “Time & Impermanence”.