Hafez Is My Spirit Animal

The simple fact of the matter is that it is very difficult--and often unwise--to stare steadily into the sun without blinking.

Camus was among the few who could do so, and his The Myth of Sisyphus is a sustained meditation on how and why one should do it.

By my junior year in high school, I appreciated the problem: the lack of fit between our hopes and desires for our lives and the brute fact that the universe cares not a whit about us or them. That is when, quite by accident, I discovered Kierkegaard. And it was Kierkegaard who assured me that that very lack of fit (what Camus called the absurd) was to be embraced: for in its embrace one discovers what he called Eternity or the Infinite. "The reason that you find it so difficult to keep from blinking," he reasoned, "is that you long for the Truth and blinking is how you find it." SK's assurances were like a lifeline thrown to a drowning man and I clutched it, hoping to be pulled to shore.

In my senior year, I first read Camus's Sisyphus, where he coolly explained to me that the lifeline Kierkegaard had tossed my way was illusory or, as he put it, "philosophical suicide." For the next several years I read and re-read Camus, hoping to find the chink in his armor, the fallacy in his argument. I remember how I would pick up the book, read a few pages, and then put it down in frustration. Damn you, Camus!

A dozen years later, I read Wittgenstein's matter-of-fact description of philosophical suicide: how the chain of justifications eventually comes to an end, our spade hits bedrock and is turned, and we say, "This is simply what I do."

Unlike Kierkegaard's argument, Wittgenstein's account of the process by which one runs out of excuses was not a justification of that human, all-too-human, response: "This is simply what I do." It was coldly descriptive. He did not advise his reader to continue to behave in that way, nor to cease from doing so. The choice belonged to the individual.

This, too, is a form of staring into the sun; this, too, is difficult.

A few years later, I read Ghazali's spiritual autobiography in which he makes an argument that is similar to Kierkegaard's, only he knew better than to try to make a virtue out of necessity. Ghazali did not try to claim that anything can be gained by embracing the absurd--much less everything. He simply asserted that we must live with the absurd, hoping and praying that God would intervene with ma'rifa or divine insight (gnosis). When that day arrives (as, he claimed, it had arrived for him) then the heart knows with certainty that "my Redeemer liveth."

Camus would assent to Ghazali's reasoning; he would not, however, claim that he had been privileged with gnosis. His integrity resides in his essential honesty.

Even so, Hafez strikes me as the sanest of them all:

Ah, God forbid that I relinquish wine
When roses are in season;
How could I do this when I'm someone who
Makes such a show of Reason?

Where's a musician, so that I can give
The profit I once found
In self-control and knowledge for a flute's songs,
And a lute's sweet sound?

The endless arguments within the schools--
Whatever they might prove--
Sickened my heart; I'll give a little time
To wine now, and to love.

Where is the shining messenger of dawn
That I might now complain
To my good fortune's harbinger of this
Long night of lonely pain?

But when did time keep faith with anyone?
Bring wine, and I'll recall
The tales of kings, of Jamshid and Kavus,
And how time took them all.

I'm not afraid of sins recorded in
My name--I'll roll away
A hundred such accounts, by His benevolence
And grace, on Judgment Day.

This lent soul, that the Friend once gave into
Hafez's care, I'll place
Within His hands again, on that day when
I see Him face to face.

[Tr. Dick Davis].