Page 15 - Omar!

is indeed unalterable, but its exact unravelling follows a plan
established by a deity with very human characteristics: a desire for
justice, a capacity for mercy, a penchant for cruelty, and an occasional
lapse into pure whimsy. Holders of this belief can hope for all sorts
of things, and are encouraged to do so by the priests of their religion.
By contrast, the newer, or ‘scientific’ determinism represented by
deism and the Rubaiyat, portrays all events as following laws or cycles
totally unrelated to human desires and personalities. Who you are,
what you do, what you think—all are immaterial in determining your
fate. Look instead, says Omar, at the facts: life is brief, and one
generation follows the next; no amount of theorizing can alter that
sequence. And he explicitly includes celestial phenomena in the
determined universe: the bowls of the earth and of the heavens both
roll on through time, heedless of human outcries against mortality.
The point is that Omar, given the sociopolitical environment in
which he lived, had to walk a narrow line between the two sorts of
determinism: his audience was in the grip of the first, so he sold them
the second by recourse to anthropomorphic metaphor, as in the
famous quatrain:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

You see, he uses the image of the heavenly record, the book in which
the deity has recorded the fate of the universe before it was set in
motion, to reach his fellow-Persians. But he does not promise an end
of time, a tribunal where sins will be judged and punished, an
ultimate value structure recognizable to mankind. No, Omar’s
descriptions of the sky are those of an astronomer, not a high priest.
If the existentialists need to locate their earliest antecedent, they will
not be able to find one more suitable than Omar Khayyam.”
Robert Baron waited. He was, after all, a man who made deals; if
the other party wished to extoll the virtues of his commodity, then let
him do so.
“Yes,” he said, when Fey had ceased. “I see this production is very
important to you. It is unfortunate that all this protest has
materialized. But I think you expected it.” He raised his hand when
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