Pearls at Random Strung

Just a place to jot down my musings.

Friday, December 10, 2010

True wisdom

This pearl, from pg. 2 of Raymond Smullyan's The Tao is Silent, is particularly relevant to me right now as I procrastinate, neither working (as I could be) nor sleeping (as I ought to be).
Had I been Laotse, I would have added the following maxim—which I think is the quintessence of Taoist philosophy:
The Sage falls asleep not 
because he ought to 
Nor even because he wants to
But because he is sleepy.


True words of wisdom indeed.
Posted by at 1:57 AM
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Why pearls, and why strung at random?

In his translation of the famous "Turk of Shiraz" ghazal of Hafez into florid English, Sir William Jones, the philologist and Sanskrit scholar and polyglot extraordinaire, transformed the following couplet:

غزل گفتی و در سفتی بیا و خوش بخوان حافظ

که بر نظم تو افشاند فلک عقد ثریا را


into:

Go boldly forth, my simple lay,
Whose accents flow with artless ease,
Like orient pearls at random strung.

The "translation" is terribly inaccurate, but worse, the phrase is a gross misrepresentation of the highly structured organization of Persian poetry. Regardless, I picked it as the name of my blog for a number of reasons: 
1) I don't expect the ordering of my posts to follow any rhyme or reason
2) Since "at random strung" is a rather meaningless phrase, I decided to go with the longer but more pompous "pearls at random strung". I rest assured that my readers are unlikely to deduce from this an effort on my part to arrogate some of Hafez's peerless brilliance!

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Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”