Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (3). More agnosticism from Ecclesiastes

Today’s Bible Reading: Ecclesiastes 1:12–2:23.

The author of Ecclesiastes was apparently pretending to be Solomon, and claimed unsurpassed wealth, power, and wisdom. Who else, then, could be in such a perfect position to try to find out what is truly fulfilling in life? This reveals an astonishingly modern aspect to Ecclesiastes: its writer submitted this question to what we would today call a scientific test.

The writer (we will, for literature’s sake, call him Solomon) said that he accumulated tremendous riches and indulged in every pleasure that a man could imagine. He lacked only liquor (distillation had not yet been invented, I think) and electronic devices. He certainly had more sexual opportunity than any man today, with the possible exception of Tiger Woods. Were he living today, he would probably be one of the few private citizens to have gone into outer space. In this sense, Solomon was like his later namesake, Suleÿman the Magnificent, a medieval sultan of Asia Minor. Solomon’s conclusion: It was all vanity and striving after wind. Some people say that whoever dies with the most toys wins. Solomon would say, whoever dies with the most toys dies.

Next the writer tried wisdom—what we would today call intellectual pursuits. He found that intelligence was far better than ignorance: “Wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness.” But he encountered the same problem with wisdom as with riches: when it’s all over, the wise man dies just like the fool.

And then he thought about future generations. Some people say, “What has posterity ever done for me?” Nevertheless, most humans think about posterity a lot. Solomon realized that whatever riches he accumulated and whatever wisdom he gained would all be left to whoever would come after him, “and who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool?” You work all your life for riches, or for wisdom, then you leave it all to someone who has not had to work for it.

There is one option Solomon apparently did not consider. It was Andrew Carnegie’s philosophy: Nobody should die rich. Andrew Carnegie was extremely wealthy, but gave most of it away to build libraries and research institutions, many of which are still going strong almost a century later. But Solomon might just have said, maybe all the people who go into those libraries will go out just as stupid as they were when they went in.

So Solomon got himself into a deep depression. You work all day, and you worry about whether there is any point to doing it. And then at night you lie awake and worry about it some more. Were Solomon alive today, I am not sure that even trazodone or doxylamine or hypnosis tapes or valerian root would help him get to sleep. If “even in the night his mind does not rest,” nothing can help. If you believe that, no matter how hard you work, luck is the empress of the world, how can you ever feel satisfied?

This was the same feeling that the wanderer had in German poet Wilhelm Müller’s Die Winterreise (Winter’s Journey). No one would remember this mediocre poem were it not transformed into utter beauty by the music of Franz Schubert. In song number 17 (Im Dorfe; In the Village), the traveler hears dogs barking and the villagers are sleeping away in their beds. Schubert’s music depicts not only the growling of the dogs and the snoring, but also the traveler’s disdain at how these people could be so stupid that they could just sleep through the night without existential angst. They dream, and then in the morning they forget their dreams. The music then shifts from growling dogs and depression to the most beatific music I have ever heard! You gotta hear it. The traveler says, Je nun, je nun—and yet, and yet! The people have, in fact, seen splendid visions in their dreams, and what is so bad about that? If only Solomon could have done this. But Solomon, like Müller’s and Schubert’s traveler, trudged on in his bleak journey. I will tell you more about Die Winterreise in future posts.

I must stop here. Please come back, because I don’t want to leave you on this depressing note. There is a way to be happy despite these things, as Solomon subsequently wrote. I warn you, though, that there will be a few more depressing posts before that.