2.1.2
Then my energy returned and I started writing again, thinking it best that I commence Book Two with something weighty, so that it should be given greater consideration and remain for longer a matter of cogitation, and, just as I commenced Book One with something to demonstrate my thorough knowledge of certain high matters — and I’m assuming you haven’t already forgotten what you read earlier — I thought it would be a good idea now to start with certain low matters, to keep things symmetrical. In addition, given that plain rock must be counted among the precious stones that are both hard to obtain and beneficial, it occurred to me that I should roll a boulder of that material down from the topmost peak of my thoughts to the lowest bottoms of men’s ears. Now, then, if you stand and watch its progress without getting in its way or trying to stop it, it will pass you by just as happiness has me, which is to say, without touching you. Otherwise (if you think it a simple matter to bar its descent), it will pass over you and thrust you under it, and God protect us from the consequences of such a thrust! Observe: here it is, shifting in preparation for its fall, and now it’s on its way. Beware then, and beware! Stand at a distance and hear the message in its thunder: “Who looks on this world with the eye of reason — on the diversity and convergence of its states and conditions, of what’s essential and what incidental, of objects and ambitions, of customs and schools of thought, of ranks and dispositions—will find that the quintessence of all that passes before him is beyond his comprehension and moves too fast for his discernment and that, while our senses may have become familiar with certain things, that very familiarity leaves us no room for wonder. Those same things never cease, all the same, to be amazing and puzzling and any who subjects even the least of them to proper scrutiny will realize that his failure to pay them due attention is equivalent to the omission of the performance of a religious obligation.
2.1.3
“Observe, for example, the different types of plants there are on Earth — how many flowers of which we cannot say, brilliantly constructed and amazingly formed though they be, that they serve a specific purpose. And look at the different types of animals — reptiles, vermin, insects, and others: some are beautiful to look at but have no use and some are ugly to look at but are most urgently needed. And look at the heavens, at all their stars—
their darāriʾ,
a star that is dirrīʾ or durrīʾ is “a star that burns and flashes”
their khunnas,
“the khunnas are all stars, or the planets, or ‘the Five Stars,’”375 etc.
their bayāniyyāt,
“those stars that neither the sun nor the moon takes down with them at their setting”
their tawāʾim
[literally, “twins”] “with reference to either pearls or stars, those that are conjoined”
their burūj
[literally, “the Houses” (of the zodiac)] “too well known to require definition”
their Tinnīn,
[literally, “the Dragon,” i.e., Draco]; “the Dragon is an obscure whiteness in the sky whose body lies in six constellations of the zodiac while its tail is in the seventh,” etc.
their Mijarrah,
[“the Milky Way”] “the gateway of the sky or its anus”376
their rujum,
[“shooting stars”] “the stars used for stoning”377
their aʿlāṭ,
“the aʿlāṭ stars are the bright ones (al-darāriʾ) that have no names”
their ināth,
[literally, “the females”] “the ināth are small stars”
their khussān,
“the stars that never set, such as Capricorn, the Pole Star, Ursa Minor and Ursa Major, and the Two Calves”378
and their anwāʾ
“a nawʾ [singular] is a star that inclines toward its setting point or sets in the west at dawn while, at the same time, another rises opposite it in the east”
— stars so dazzling that the eye turns from them in exhaustion.
2.1.4
“Observe too the differences among people’s countenances and heads, for you see scarcely one human face that resembles another or find among their heads, meaning their minds, one that is like another. There are mortals who have chosen propinquity and mixing, jostling and crowding, pressing together and colliding, vying with and trying one another, pushing and shoving, battling and butting, competing and blackening each other’s names, bargaining and chaffering, and so on, according to their different persuasions; examples are traders and women. Others provide a contrary model, having chosen isolation and withdrawal; examples are ascetics and hermits. Yet others have made it their business to fall over one another to tell lies and blather, exaggerate and flatter, such as poets and the hirelings who sing the praises of kings in all those gazettes that they print,379 while yet others again confront the latter with the opposite, preferring truth-telling and investigation, enquiry and careful consideration, definitive decisions and the comparison of past, present, and future; examples are the great philosophers, physicians, and scientists.
2.1.5
“Some work all day long, toiling with both hands and both feet, quite possibly without uttering a single word; examples are those involved in arduous industries. Others move neither hand nor foot nor shoulder nor head and pronounce only a few words on certain days of the week, the rest of which they spend coddled in comfort, lolling in luxury’s lap; examples are preachers, homilists, and religious guides. Some murder, batter, wound, and kill, such as soldiers, while others treat, medicate, cure, and revive, like nurses and the Friends of God Almighty, men of extraordinary spiritual feats and miracles.380 One man is hired to bring about divorces,381 another as a ‘legitimizer,’382 one for impregnation and another for inhumation, one to put asunder and another to make peace between persons. Some lurk in their houses and hardly ever leave them unless obliged to do so, while others climb mountains and lateen yards, trees, and pulpits or descend into valleys, drains, and cesspits. Some stay up all night writing books, while others can’t sleep a wink till they’ve burned one. Some rule and others are ruled. Some lead and others are led. And yet, for all that contradiction and contrast, all their efforts and actions bring them to the same end, which is that, when a person gets up each morning, he sticks his nostrils into a foul smell before sniffing the scent of flowers and enjoying the pleasures of the daylight hours.”
2.1.6
Stranger, though, than any of the situations you have just passed in review is that of our friends the Market-men and the Bag-men. Given that their trade depends on the employment of just two tools, namely surmise and assertion, and has no need of any others, and that the wellspring of their statements and source of any tirade, the basis of their claims and greater part of their stock-in-trade is to say,383 “It is likely that this thing to which you refer falls under the rubric either of the trope attributive or the trope lexical, or the trope tropical or the expression periphrastic, or it may be that it belongs to the category of referring like to like, or opposite to opposite, or under that of ‘expressing the intrinsic while intending the extrinsic’ (or the reverse), or belongs to the type known as ‘mentioning the part while intending the whole’ (or the reverse), or to the category known as ‘the method of the sage,’384 or is to be approached via the door of irony, or the aperture of allusion, or the peephole of person-switching,385 or the rent of redundancy, or the casement of carefully crafted composition, or the inlet of implication, or the tear in ‘tight weaving,’386 or the spiracle of the quasi-paradoxical simile, or the knot-hole of the substitution of what is known for what is not, or the toe rings of the generalization of the attribute, or the eyelet of the appositional aside, or the portholes of punning,” it is inappropriate for them to mix in among all these “ors” and “ifs” any of the following: