Page 3 - Ruminations

1. Awake!

The sudden realization of former ignorance or illusion is noted in
many cultures: kenshō, piercing the veil of maya, Plato’s cave, Saul on
the road to Damascus, and on up through the hallucinatorily
transcendental Sixties. It is often described as analogous to darkness
changing to light, an “enlightenment” in which something not
previously understood or accepted is abruptly perceived by the mind’s
eye and its veracity validated in that instant.
Literature with a proselytizing agenda, regardless of content, may
seek to evoke that enlightenment directly. Curiously, despite their very
different intent, both An Essay on Man and The Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam begin with the same imperative: Awake! Both poems are
polemical, intending to change the reader’s basic perception of his
place in the cosmos; they are calls to existential reconsideration,
starting from the viewpoint that the reader is sleepwalking through life
under profound misapprehensions. The latter are effectively dreams
from which one may awaken by attending to the writer’s verse.
Pope’s intention is anti-rational, indicting mankind for ignoring
reality on the limited scale we can perceive it and presuming to
understand the divine and its purposes. He held the half-awake view,
still current in the West, that our Promethean quest for knowledge is
not merely doomed but foolish: his idea of awakening is to avert the
eyes and enjoy a sweet dream of unreason.
FitzGerald, on the other hand, presents an ambivalent deist or early
existentialist viewpoint cloaked in Eastern exoticism. His response to
the indifference of any higher power to human fate is hedonism—
exactly what religious orthodoxy uses as a bogeyman to enforce
conformity. But FitzGerald, following Omar’s anti-clericalism, goes
further: irreligion. Thus one should both pursue sensual pleasure and
condemn an uncaring universe and its deluded apologists.
That complex response (love or wrath in quatrain 56) anticipates
twentieth-century reactions to “the death of God” and the birth of
ultimate meaninglessness: either joyful freedom to self-invent
(Chesterton in Man Alive, despite his Catholicism) or angst and
depression (Camus, Sartre and every stripe of disappointed theologian
ready to bolt for the comfort of Pope’s unknowable but beneficent
deity). The awakened attitude presented in FitzGerald’s “rendering” of
medieval Persian poetry into a popular Romantic classic paradoxically
presents a closer approximation to “enlightenment.”