25 Bahman 1404
Quatrain 23 of 75
“Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust Descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and—sans End!”
Reflection · Winter 1404
In winter the dust is close enough to touch. Not metaphorically — the frozen ground, the bare trees, the absence of everything that was alive in spring. What we yet may spend is smaller now — not in the sense of fewer days necessarily, but in the sense that the days are shorter and colder and the account is more visible from here.
Khayyam ends with sans end because that is the real nature of death: not a conclusion but the permanent state of never-concluding. Hold the verse in winter like a compass: it tells you not which direction to walk, but that you are walking, and that the walking is the thing, and that under the dust there is no more walking to be done.