A Premonition from the Rubiayat

The idea that the whole world is being “shattered to bits” and remade “better” may seem fairly close at hand these days. But if the means of actually engineering such a feat is very recent, the desire apparently is not:

Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate 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!

Omar Khayyám  (1041-1131), was an accomplished Persian mathematician and astronomer; English speakers, in particular, will more probably remember him as the author of a book of poems — The Rubiayat of Omar Khyyám —  translated into English by Edward Fitzgerald, published first in 1859.  A copy was later “discovered” — in a rack of remaindered books on their way to oblivion — by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, part of a group later known as the Pre-raphaelites. The poems address brevity of life, the joy of friendship, the pleasures of food and wine, and the empty vanity of seeking durable fame or honour. At least this once, they also give voice to a mathematical expression of desire.

I am in debt to Vilém Flusser (1820-1991) for recognising the mathematical desire in Khayyám’s poem.