Rubaiyat Soho

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

But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.

Ah, Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits--and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!"

I'm already in love with this guy. He has this awesome handle on life, some massive grasp of unchanging fortune. It's pretty humbling when you realise it was written in the 19th century - even 200 years later most people still aren't capable of forming such coherent opinions. Rather than trying to battle life he embraced it, regardless of its frequent downfalls. He knew that however long he brooded it would not change life's inevitable outcome, so it's stupid to waste time wishing for something more.

One of my favourite stanzas in the whole poem - aside from those three - is this:

Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill'd Desire,
And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire,
Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerged from, shall so soon expire.

He's basically denying the physical existence of Paradise and Inferno, reasoning that Heaven and Hell are products of our own lifetime - how we face our mortality. At least that's how I interpret it, and it actually makes a shitload of sense if you think about it that way. Why spend your whole life according to the rules of an assumed higher power just in case there's something better on the other side when you can make the most of the present and know that it is real. Life isn't a theory, the afterlife is, so it makes sense that you should embrace one and keep the other at arm's length.

It's only ever when I'm at my most reflective that my dad decides to invade my train of thought with the loudest hairdryer ever invented. I'm not even joking, I'm haunted by the BaByliss Pro.