14 Mehr 1405
Quatrain 43 of 75
“The Grape that can with Logic absolute
The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute:
The subtle Alchemist that in a Trice
Life's leaden Metal into Gold transmute.”
Reflection · Autumn 1405
The grape in autumn is at its most capable of confuting the sects — fully ripened, pressed, fermenting, the logic of its existence the most complete logic available to the senses. In a Trice — the autumn trice is longer than the summer one, the transmutation more deliberate. The leaden metal of mortality becomes, in autumn wine, something more complex than gold — something amber and deep and full of the summer's compressed experience.
Khayyam chose autumn as the time when the grape makes its strongest argument, and the sects are left with only the abstract against the actual. The actual wins, always.