No. 133
O friend, come—let us not lament tomorrow’s pain;
This present moment count as precious gain;
Tomorrow, when we pass beyond this ancient place,
We’ll stand as equals with seven thousand years again.*
Philosophical Reflection
The poem begins by addressing someone. That is not a small detail in a body of work whose severest quatrains speak to no one at all: the proposal here is made to a friend, and the verbs that follow are plural — let us not grieve, let us count this moment. Whatever Khayyam is recommending, it is not a private discipline. The unit of his consolation is two people, and the invitation is the first move of the argument rather than a courtesy before it.
What the friend is asked to do with the present moment is stated in the language of the counting-house and the battlefield. The moment is described as coin in hand — present currency, as opposed to a promise of payment — and the friend is told to treat it as spoil, the word for what is seized and carried off rather than earned or awaited. The distinction is doing work here. Tomorrow’s grief is anxiety about a promissory note; the moment in hand is the only holding whose content can be assayed, because it is the only one you are currently in possession of.
Then the frame widens, and the world is named as an ancient cloister one passes out of — the same architecture of transit that recurs across his quatrains, a religious house with no host, where residence is temporary and departure is through a door you did not choose. Beyond it lies the figure the poem was built to deliver: seven thousand years, the received age of the world in his time, and with the whole of it we will be level. The term he uses is the accountant’s word for a settled balance — head to head, even, nothing owing in either direction.
The philosophical force of that levelling is easy to understate. It is not the moralist’s point that death takes king and beggar alike; Khayyam is not comparing social stations. He is collapsing the time-axis itself. On the far side of the cloister wall, the person who died yesterday and the person who died seven thousand years ago are contemporaries, because duration has stopped indexing anything. And this from the man who fixed the length of the solar year to a precision the Gregorian calendar would not match for five centuries. Nobody in his century understood the structure of time more exactly, and it is precisely that understanding which lets him say where the structure ends.
Which is what disarms the grief the first line refuses. Tomorrow’s pain is distress about a position in a sequence — later, sooner, still to come — and the sequence is exactly the thing that will not survive the passage out. Anxiety about the future is an ordering error, a category applied outside the domain where it holds. The one coordinate that is not collapsed is the one being stood on while the poem is spoken, and the only configuration in which the levelling has not yet happened is two people, present, with the cup between them. Khayyam is not urging his friend to seize the day before it is lost. He is pointing out that they are standing on the only ground there is, and that it would be strange to spend it grieving over terrain that will not exist.
Footnote
* Source: Tarabkhaneh, Homaei, no. 133, translated by Kam Austine for Philosophy in Verse.
ای دوست بیا تا غم فردا نخوریم
وین یک دم نقد را غنیمت شمریم
فردا که ازین دیر کهن درگذریم
با هفت هزار سالگان سر بسریم
Related Treatises: Risāla dar Kashf-e Ḥaqīqat-e Nawrūz, Ḍarūrat al-Taḍādd fī al-Wujūd
Internal Themes: #LiveInTheUnconscious #PresentMoment #Existentialism #Nihilism #Aestheticism #DeepTime #Friendship #PersianPhilosophy
Published as part of Philosophy in Verse — The Omar Khayyam Project
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