12 Mehr 1405
Quatrain 41 of 75
“For "IS" and "IS-NOT" though with Rule and Line,
And, "UP-AND-DOWN" without, I could define,
I yet in all I only cared to know,
Was never deep in anything but—Wine.”
Reflection · Autumn 1405
In autumn the Is and Is-Not question acquires the quality of audit. Is this year what it was supposed to be? Is-Not the year already mostly over? The rule and line are capable of answering both with precision. Khayyam answers both with wine. The depth he found in wine is the depth of autumn especially — complex, full of the summer's compressed experience. The rule and line cannot capture this.
Was never deep in anything but — there is something honest and brave in this admission. He spent his whole life being deep in mathematics and astronomy and philosophy, and at the end of it, in the autumn of accounting, he finds the deepest thing was the cup. Not the maps he made of the sky. The wine poured under it.