Thinking about the joylessness of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations made me recall this passage from the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh story. Siduri, goddess and tavern-keeper at the edge of the world, speaks to Gilgamesh, who seeks a way out of the world of living and dying:
“When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.”Fear of death isn’t the problem for Marcus. But what he seems not to know is that life can be beautiful. And not mindlessly beautiful but beautiful even when or especially when one understands that it comes to an end.
Related reading
All OCA Gilgamesh posts (Pinboard)
[The Gilgamesh passage is from N.K. Sandars’s highly readable composite The Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Penguin, 1972). For a scholarly translation, try The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Maureen Gallery Kovacs (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). “Old Babylonian”: not what’s known as the Standard Version of the story.]
comments: 4
Not making lemonade out of lemons, eh?
Just eat the lemon as it is, for such is life???
Well, Siduri was a tavern-keeper. And beer and wine flowed freely in Mesopotamia. I don’t think they’d have any problem with lemonade. Maybe they’d make hard lemonade? :)
Hard lemonade, I like that!
But I meant Marcus A, not Siduri--not churning out joy.
Aaugh! I misunderstood. Yes, I think Marcus would just eat the lemon. And if someone handed him a glass of ice-cold lemonade, he'd probably remind himself how much it already looked like no. 1.
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