Life itself is unsatisfaction, but to look ahead to death is greater unsatisfaction.'
? ? ? ? 'You are worse off than Omar,' I said. 'He, at least, after the customary agonizing of youth, found content and made of his materialism a joyous thing.'
? ? ? ? 'Who was Omar?' Wolf Larsen asked, and I did no more work that day, nor the next, or next.
? ? ? ? In his random reading he had never chanced upon the 'Rubaiyat,' and it was to him like a great find of treasure. Much I remembered, possibly two thirds of the quatrains, and I managed to piece out the remainder without difficulty. We talked for hours over single stanzas, and I found him reading into them a wail of regret and a rebellion which for the life of me I could not discover myself. Possibly I recited with a certain joyous lilt which was my own, for- his memory was good, and at a second rendering, very often the first, he made a quatrain his own- he recited the same lines and invested them with an unrest and passionate revolt that were well-nigh convincing.
? ? ? ? I was interested as to which quatrain he would like best, and was not surprised when he hit upon the one born of an instant's irritability and quite at variance with the Persian's complacent philosophy and genial code of life:
What, without asking, hither hurried Whence?
And, without asking, Whither hurried hence!
Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine
Must drown the memory of that insolence!
? ? ? ? 'Great!' Wolf Larsen cried.
Pages:
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170