1.13.3
“When I grasped that slumber had escaped me, even though sleep I feigned, and that I’d have to witness dawn whether I resisted or was resigned, I stretched out my hand for a book to read, with the following hope, that, ‘If it doesn’t make me sleep, it may at least engage my attention with some trope.’ I picked up the first thing to come to hand, feeling no preference for any particular work, and what should it be but Kitāb Muwāzanat al-ḥālatayn wa-murāzanat al-ālatayn (The Book of Balancing the Two States and Comparing the Two Straits)220 by the Honored Shaykh and Productive Scholar of Perfect Virtue, Abū Rushd ‘Brains’ ibn Ḥazm,221 whose rhetorical skills in both prose and verse have provoked widespread enthusiasm. This is a book such as no author before him ever hatched nor any writer, however distinguished, ever matched, for in it he compares man’s two states of wretchedness and leisure, of joy and care, of gain and loss, of sorrow and pleasure, from childhood till he arrives at maturity, then desiccated senility, all set out in facing tables using a columnar system that comparison enables. However, the shaykh (God sanctify his soul and elevate his rank and worth to the highest point above the earth) living, as it seems to me, a life of goodly weal, with abundant fortune and energetic zeal, gave undue weight to pleasure and failed to treat life’s evils in equal measure. He even asserts that pleasure is to be had from both deed and thought—unlike pain, in which thinking is of no import—claiming that were he to picture himself cavorting with a ripe young wench, and she with him, he’d be so shaken by ecstasy he’d be entirely carried away, chest and flank, bed and bench. However, I doubted his words upon this point, thinking to myself, ‘Glory be! Every writer, however great, must on occasion be out of joint’: in my case, when I pictured the drunkard, the drowser, and the yawner, as I lay there trying to sleep, all that picturing didn’t compensate for the actual thing by even a jot,222 and I found no pleasure in it, either a little or a lot. I tend to the belief of a certain madman that the pleasure of sleep is not felt by the sleeper, either while, after, or before it prevails—a knot those who hold to the humoral theory223 remain incapable of untying by talking or thinking, or even with their teeth and their nails.
1.13.4
“This said, the words of the compiler of these tables are of so full of knowledge and wisdom as to bemuse the expert critic, and reduce any maven, in the investigation of either argument, to confusion. After, then, I’d turned on them my eye’s gaze, and it had returned aglaze, and I’d applied to them the blade of careful examination, only for it to come back full of indentation, I determined to throw light on this problematique by consulting one known for his skill in debate and insightful critique, saying to myself, ‘Just as my hand fell upon the nearest tome, so let my next choice be the neighbor closest to home.’ Living near me was a metropolitan whose adornments, worth, and culture by his congregation were lauded and cheered at a length equal to his beard. I went to see him at midday, all ready to rejoice, and found him wearing a buckle to amaze, a habit to set the heart ablaze. Setting before him the two tables, I said, ‘Rule for me on this case, and may you be rewarded by God, Lord of the Human Race.’ He looked at them, then nodded off and started blinking, complaining he was too sleepy to do much thinking, and telling me something to the effect that since he wasn’t one of those whose ambitions ever rose to rhyming in prose, he ‘hadn’t caught their implication or grasped their signification, though, had they been penned in hackneyed terms, I vouch, I’d have got them as easy as sitting on this couch!’
1.13.5
“I thought, ‘His advancement up the ranks of the clergy has retarded his scholarship and erudition, and the longer his beard and sleeves have grown the shorter have become his intellect and intuition. Let me enquire then of the silliest and least intelligent of men, and who other should that be but the one who teaches children their ABC?’ In the town was one who, despite his pride and arrogance, had, for these qualities, won renown. Off I set, then, to where he was and put to him the case, and he stood up, clapped his hands, rolled his eyes, and said, ‘Guided by sound judgment, you’ve arrived at the right place. If you wish to know which of the two arguments carries the greater weight, is the more correct and accurate, place the two columns (minus the binding) in a scale. The one that dips will be the weightier; on that all men will agree without fail.’ I left him, then, in fury and regret, cursing the sleeplessness that had driven me to ask a teacher of young boys, even after I’d read in books on more than one occasion, and heard from men of perspication, that they were the most feeble of mind among God’s creation, the most to ignorance inclined, the furthest from ratiocination and most given to foolishness and hallucination.
1.13.6
“On that day then I betook myself to a jurisprudent, of all that people the most resplendent, who had inflated his turban and coiled it round and round, using extra cloth, and decorations on his gown, and to him I said, ‘Give me a ruling, most virtuous and sagacious man, as to which of the two arguments in your opinion is the closer to the truth, which most sooth.’ Answered he, ‘If you’ve come to me seeking a ruling, by my opinion to be guided and my path to emulate, allow me to tell you (due deliberation having been devoted to this school of law so convoluted) that we — we noble company of jurists, that is — are men of debate, makers of the rules that govern the rules that govern the game, revealers of fine distinctions among things that might otherwise seem the same; likewise that it is our way, to make clear the truth, to analyze in depth and go to great lengths in argumentation, since there’s no escape, if you’d sniff the aroma of veracity, from expatiation, and from seeking the guidance of one of the schools, which, by insisting on the impossible and making from the nonexistent something necessarily existent,224 imposes its rules. In my opinion, then, you must add up the words of the two arguments and calculate the number of letters that in each column are disposed, and whichever has more will then be the weightier and better composed (though God alone truly knows).’ So I parted ways with that jurisprudent as I had from his foolish friend, telling myself that any who asked him for a ruling had none to blame but himself, in the end.