Title:  The Philosophy of Despair

Author:  David Starr Jordan

Release Date:  December, 2003 [EBook #4754] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on March 12, 2002]

Edition:  10

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** Start of the project gutenberg EBOOK, the philosophy of despair ***

This etext was produced by David A. Schwan, davidsch@earthlink.net.

The Philosophy of Despair

by David Starr Jordan

To John Maxson Stillman

In Token of Good Cheer

A darkening sky and a whitening sea,
And the wind in the palm trees tall;
Soon or late comes a call for me,
Down from the mountain or up from the sea,
Then let me lie where I fall.

And a friend may write — for friends there be,
On a stone from the gray sea wall,
“Jungle and town and reef and sea —
I loved God’s Earth and His Earth loved me,
Taken for all in all.”

Today is your day and mine, the only day we have, the day in which we play our part.  What our part may signify in the great whole, we may not understand, but we are here to play it, and now is our time.  This we know, it is a part of action, not of whining.  It is a part of love, not cynicism.  It is for us to express love in terms of human helpfulness.  This we know, for we have learned from sad experience that any other course of life leads toward decay and waste.

The Philosophy of Despair

The Bubbles of Sáki.

From Fitzgerald’s exquisite version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, I take the following quatrains which may serve as a text for what I have to say: 

So when the angel of the darker Drink
At last shall find you by the river-brink,
And offering you his cup, invite your Soul
Forth to your lips to quaff, you shall not shrink.

Why, if the soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the air of Heaven ride,
Wert not a shame — wert not a shame for him
In this clay carcase crippled to abide?

’Tis but a tent where takes his one-day’s rest
A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest;
The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrásh
Strikes, and prepares it for another guest.

And fear not lest Existence, closing your
Account, and mine, shall know the like no more;
The Eternal Sáki from that bowl hath pour’d
Millions of bubbles like us, and will pour.

When you and I behind the veil are past,
Oh, but the long, long while the world shall last,
Which of our coming and departure heeds
As the Sev’n Seas shall heed a pebble-cast.