5 Mordad 1405
Quatrain 47 of 75
“And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,
End in the Nothing all Things end in—Yes—
Then fancy while Thou art, Thou art but what
Thou shalt be—Nothing—Thou shalt not be less.”
Reflection · Summer 1405
The Nothing in summer is buried under so much Something that the verse reads almost as a puzzle: how can all this end in Nothing? The wine is cold, the lip is warm, the summer is at its most insistently itself. And yet: yes. Thou shalt not be less — in summer this is easy to believe. You are so much right now, so fully present. The Nothing that awaits seems like a misunderstanding. But it is not.
The gentleness of the reassurance is the verse's gift. Yes, it ends in Nothing. And you will not be less than Nothing, because Nothing is the unreducible. Your existence will not have been reduced. It will have been complete.