3.12.9
“‘Was it on this,’ bursts in the lover, ‘we agreed when we parted? Was it for this you encouraged me to travel when you said one night, “It seems to me, good man, you are a little tired. Should you travel to a land where the air is good, your former vigor would return to you and we to our earlier happy state”? Was that just a trick of yours to make me leave so you could have a clear field in which to strut as you please and practice the science of measuring pulses and the motions of the limbs? Don’t I have a pulse, like everybody else, on which you could learn this noble science, or would you claim it has grown so weak it will no longer serve to learn on — when, if it is indeed weak, it is so because of you, and when I know that, prior to our wedding night, it throbbed, shook, and wagged? Do lovers thus act when far apart, is this how each betrays his counterpart? Does God condone for you a life of luxury while I know hard times and misery? Wantonly you feel men’s pulses while my brow is covered in sweat; indeed, with an onset of feverish chills I fret. Were they not enough, my sufferings with you at home, when I’d leave in the morning to toil and return worn out, you’d vent all your worries upon me, and all your reproaches at me you’d spout? To keep you in comfort I wore myself to a sliver, I went without sleep because you were soon to deliver.(1) I tired myself out that you might eat, worked hard that you might enjoy a life that was sweet, went cold that you might be warm, worried that you might be calm, kept vigil that you might sleep a portion of the night, grew thin that your belly with food might grow tight. Now it’s clear which of us is faithful, which a hypocrite and ungrateful. Back then I’d tell you honesty’s a rarer thing in women than in the male, for men are always preoccupied, their situation frail. They’re distracted from pleasure, for work and toil they must, and good sense and brains turn them from lust. Women have no worries but how to excite longing and stir dissension among men, with no regard for where or when. You’d reply, “Not so. In fact women are more respectable and modest, less greedy and dishonest, more given by nature to chastity, further by inborn temper from hypocrisy.” If, then, fate should ever reunite us and we talk at large of loyalty, of affection and sincerity, I’ll give you arguments against which you cannot prevail and demonstrate how far superior is a man to any who wear the veil—those treacherous treasonists, those fibbing fabulists. And if you hold fast to denial and disdain, the cudgel will be there to make sure you’re whomped, as will the hand, to slaps and punches ever prompt, and if you grab my forelock or the front of my gown, and broadcast my shame all over town, I’ll hang you like a crucifix from a nail, or throttle you till you wail.(1)’ When these thoughts waylay him, his anger stirs him to a frenzy, and he wishes he could fly home in a cloud of dust, his joy being turned to grief, his mind nonplussed.
3.12.10
“Despite which,” went on the Fāriyāq, “sorrow is, in principle, beneficial. It prevents random but seductive hopes and desires from driving out insight and good sense. This calms the mind and prevents it from mooning about at the water holes of the inconceivable, and things settle down to a point at which the soul can wean itself from the unachievable. I allude to this in the following verses of mine:
Many a sorrow has saved the heart from silliness
As rust conserves a pot whose metal’s thinning.
All one to me are love’s raptures, so quickly passed,
Come they at its end or its beginning.”
He continued, “The clearest and most creative thoughts are those that occur during one of three states: the first is at the onset of sorrow, the second in bed just before falling asleep, and the third in the latrine. The last involves the breakdown of concentrated matters exhaled by the bowels and the intestines and this breakdown and exhalation taking place in the lower part has the effect of breaking down, at the same time and place, whatever may have coagulated in the higher folds of the brain. Some of this matter then departs in a downward direction while some of the images formed by the brain rise, like steam rising from the earth to thicken into a raincloud.
3.12.11
“From the preceding you will have worked out that more benefits result from sorrow than from joy, because joy, which consists of a proliferation of fancies and dispersal of thoughts, incites to lightheadedness, distractedness, and the scattered distribution of thoughts among the fancies of the soul and its disparate desires. Sorrow, on the other hand, consists of their ingathering and collection, which is why most scholars have been impoverished tramps and few of those who have excelled at intellectual pursuits have been rich or comfortably off, unless some kind of asceticism and abstemiousness, accompanied by sorrow, happens to have taken root in their constitutions.” He went on, “The best ideas that have occurred to me have been occasioned by unhappy presentiments and grief-inspired sentiments, due either to the loneliness of separation or to disappointment and deprivation, or to envy of some knowledge or skill — but of money or wealth, never, unless it were for a good deed, such as the construction of schools or the charitable support of some needy person. I am truly amazed at all those monks, not one of whom, for all the loneliness and deprivation that they experience, has ever shone as a scholar or left behind him any legacy. If I were a monk, I’d fill the monastery with verse and prose and write fifty maqāmahs on lentils alone. I wish I knew how it is possible for any man alone in his cell, with the rich, fragrant, dark green forests, tranquil sea, and ships in full sail below him, the towering, snowcapped mountains to his right and left, the cloudless empyrean above him, and the villages and houses before him, to spend his whole day winking and blinking,(1) yawning, stretching, and limbering up his stomach without writing a word of prose or poetry, especially given that the beauty of the women of these lands has the capacity to induce serenity and peace of mind. If all these magnificent scenes do not inspire those ascetics to write a book, what else can? Moreover, many prisoners while in dire straits have written exquisite works of which residents of vast palaces are incapable. As for ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Muʿtazz,129 of whom it is said that he would look at the pots and pans in his house and use them to make similes, I can say only that not every slave is an ʿAbd Allāh.130 Thus we observe that nowadays, as people’s wealth increases, their wit decreases.
3.12.12