That Peculiar Affliction

No one chooses to be afflicted by the Socratic daimonion--not Hafiz, Goethe, Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, Emerson, Wittgenstein, Camus, Norman O. Brown, and not even the Mazeppist Marabout Errant. But each, in his own way, has suffered its relentless goading so as never to know anything that approximates rest.

On his deathbed, we are told, that Goethe asked for the shutters of his room to be opened. The legend developed that he called for "More light!" Legend or not, it is that deathless desire for lucidity over all else that marks the victim of this peculiar affliction.

"They speak of my drinking," runs the Scottish proverb, "but never of my thirst." This is the Hafizean condition. Interpreters of Hafiz who fret over whether the wine of which he wrote was literal or metaphorical miss the point. As Northrop Frye might say, it was both metaphorical and literal.

Hafiz longed for moments of lucidity, and he was happy to take them through whatever means he could acquire them.

Because he knew--as so many of his interpreters apparently do not--that, in the end, lucidity is the best revenge.