“Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.” (“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”) —Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942)
But perhaps he was mistaken. Perhaps the truth is simpler: When the stone is gone, the man remains.
Sisyphus Undone; or, It Was Tuesday
by Donald S. Yarab
He rose, as ever, with the morning’s breath, the hill still steep, the silence oddly wide. No stone to greet him with its weight or will— no groan of earth, no task to be defied.
The gods were gone. Their laughter had grown faint, or else the air refused to carry sound. The path he wore through centuries lay bare, a scar now healing into senseless ground.
He searched for signs: a crack, a trace, a mark, but found no proof that toil had ever been. His hands, once strong with strain, now idle hung, still shaped by burdens long dissolved within.
He sat. The dust rose lightly at his knee. A lark began to sing, then flew away. The sky, untroubled, held no word for him. The world had turned. It was another day.
What is the self when labor fades to wind? What is the myth once struggle slips its chain? He breathed. No answer stirred the lucid air. The hill was whole. The man was left, and plain.
One of the most striking images from Montaigne’s Essays, which has lodged itself firmly in my mind, comes from his Apology for Raymond Sebond. Specifically, within one paragraph, he uses wheat as an extended metaphor or an allegory wherein he suggests that the more wisdom or knowledge one acquires, the more humble one becomes. He writes:
To really learned men has happened what happens to ears of wheat: they rise high and lofty, heads erect and proud, as long as they are empty; but when they are full and swollen with grain in their ripeness, they begin to grow humble and lower their horns. (Montaigne, 1963, p. 227)
The image captures what I have found to be my experience insofar as that, with each passing year, as my hair has silvered and my eyes dimmed, I have found that wisdom requires casting the certitude, rigidity, and knowledge of youth aside for the humility of lived experience.
Additionally, I find the lesson to be an extraordinary corollary to my personal motto, about which I have previously written, Humilitatem Initium Sapientiae (humility is the beginning of wisdom).
Thus, having reflected if not obsessed upon Montaigne’s insight for well over a fortnight, I finally shaped my thoughts about it into a poem, the results of which are below.
The Ripened Ear (Inspired by Montaigne)
Beneath the sun’s unyielding gaze, it grows, The tender stalk, upright and full of pride, Its hollow strength unbent by winds that blow, Yet void of fruit, it stands unsatisfied.
But time, the patient sower, bids it yield, To weight of grain within its swelling breast, It bows its head, as on the golden field, The burdened ear finds wisdom’s humble crest.
So too the soul, in ignorance, stands tall, Unbowed by truths it dares not yet to see, Until the harvest’s gentle weight does call, And bends the heart to find humility.
For wisdom ripens where humility’s sown, And humbleness, by wisdom, is full-grown.
Montaigne, M. de. (1963). Essays and selected writings: A bilingual edition (D. M. Frame, Trans. & Ed.). St. Martin’s Press.
The Epic of Gilgamesh and its related ancient tales have long been a source of inspiration for me, often woven into my prose. Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of reading an essay by Andrew George, written in 2012, which I highly recommend to your attention: The Mayfly on the River: Individual and Collective Destiny in the Epic of Gilgamesh. As with all of George’s works, this essay is masterful, and it resonated with much of my recent work. By coincidence, his reference to the mayfly aligned perfectly with a sub-theme of a monograph I have been developing over the past several weeks.
Inspired by these reflections and my own experience with the loss of close friends, I chose to explore The Epic of Gilgamesh through poetry, marking a departure from my usual prose. Below, I offer a poem that captures a dream in which Gilgamesh contemplates the profound absence of Enkidu, his friend and companion, who met death as punishment for the transgressions he and Gilgamesh committed against the gods. The timeless relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu seemed to me a fitting metaphor for the sorrow that accompanies the loss of friends and the enduring nature of their memory.
An Audio Recitation of Donald S. Yarab’s The Dream of Gilgamesh
The Dream of Gilgamesh
In the shadows of my sleep, you came, Enkidu, my brother, carved from the heavens, The rock that fell to earth and struck me whole. But now the earth has claimed you, Silent is the storm of your breath, Felled like the great cedar, your might is no more. I reach for you, yet grasp but dust.
The gods whisper through the winds, Enkidu, you are beyond my reach, Though I call, your name echoes Through the empty halls of Uruk, A soundless shadow, a memory unmade.
In the dream, I see you on the plain, Your laughter rolls like thunder once more, Yet it is distant, swallowed by the sky. I run to you, but the earth swallows my feet, The horizon stretches and bends, And you fade, a shadow of stars, Leaving me to wrestle with the night.
Oh, Enkidu, my companion, my rock from the heavens, In life, you steadied me, made my heart whole. Now the world is too wide, The journey too long. What joy can be found in Uruk’s walls, Without your hand upon my shoulder? You lie beneath the river stones, And I am left to wander the desolate road alone.
When I was but twelve years old and in the sixth grade, I was already a peculiar lad—of that, there can be no dispute. One of my distinct memories from that time is sharing with Miss Davis, my teacher, that I had purchased a dictionary, which I studied ardently each night to enrich my vocabulary. Even then, I was enamored with words and punctuation—the brick and mortar of literature and poetry—and I was learning as much about them as I could. A few years later, in high school, as I have noted elsewhere, a very dear educator, my sophomore English teacher Mrs. Calpin, honored me with a graduation gift: a thesaurus, in recognition of my love of words.
At college, I developed another peculiar habit, alongside acquiring yet another new dictionary. Whenever I coined a neologism (which I believed perfectly appropriate to do), I would record it on a sheet that I had inserted into the dictionary for future reference. That dictionary remains in my possession, though not readily at hand or in regular use, as will soon be explained. Otherwise, I would gladly provide an example of one of those neologisms.
After I finished college and law school, and was sufficiently recompensed as an attorney for the federal government, I indulged myself with the purchase of the complete hardbound set of The Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition as well as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. It is a safe assumption that few homes, indeed, few offices, possess either of these gems for consultation, let alone for regular use. But the wealth of words contained in these volumes—the backbone of a rich and wondrous language—is awe-inspiring. Not once have I regretted the sum spent on their purchase, nor the richness they have added to both my writing and knowledge.
This lifelong fascination with language, along with those dictionaries and thesauruses, naturally informs my choice of words in my prose writing and poetry, where every term is carefully considered. This serves as a preface and background to a brief note I would like to append to my poem Where is Am I?
Some who have read the poem may be struck by the verse:
The shadow of a shadow, a footfall lost to time’s soft track?
In particular, they may find footfall to be wholly unfamiliar. Of course, the vocabulary in the poem was not selected by happenstance; every word was chosen with deliberate care, and footfall was no exception. I hesitated only momentarily before selecting this word, but ultimately decided that context should guide the reader (or listener, as poems should always be recited after being read).
To clarify, I did consider alternatives such as step, trace, footprint, and mark, but I ultimately returned to footfall during the poem’s construction. Footfall is not a neologism; it appears in the Oxford English Dictionary (see accompanying image of the Oxford English Dictionary entry for footfall). Footfall refers to the act of stepping—the motion and sound of a foot hitting the ground—rather than the trace or mark left behind, such as a footprint. As such, footfall captures the fleeting nature of action itself, emphasizing the transitory motion rather than the lasting trace of a footprint.
Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition – entry for footfall
To add another layer to my choice of footfall, it was not just the meaning but the sound of the word itself that carried significance. Again, poetry is to be recited, not just read. The soft, muted quality of the word, when spoken aloud, mirrors the quiet, almost imperceptible nature of the action it describes. The word begins with a gentle f sound, followed by a soft, cushioned ending—a fall that lands lightly, much like the act of stepping itself. It has an almost whispered quality, evoking the idea of a footstep that passes quietly through time, barely noticed before it fades entirely.
This auditory element of the word footfall reinforces the theme of impermanence in the poem. The word itself, in both sound and evanescence, fades even as it is spoken, much like the action it represents disappears into time’s soft track. The fleeting nature of footfall contrasts with the more solid, lasting impression suggested by alternatives like footprint or mark. Where those words imply something left behind, footfall emphasizes the moment of movement itself—the instant when the foot touches the ground, just before it lifts again, leaving no lasting trace.
It is this auditory resonance that made footfall the right choice for the verse, as it complements the poem’s exploration of the transient and fragile nature of human conscious presence and action in the universe. In pairing this word with time’s soft track, the verse captures the tension between motion and stillness, existence and disappearance, echoing the poem’s larger themes of impermanence and the passing of time.
This interpretation also explains my selection of the image of an eroding footprint, a fossilized mark in sand, as a visual metaphor for time’s imperceptible erasure of human presence, chosen to illustrate the poem. The image embodies the idea of humanity, an individual, attempting to leave a lasting mark, while acknowledging that even fossils, over time, are subject to the elements—in time’s soft track.
The word footfall also appears in T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets. Eliot has been a favorite of mine since I first read Murder in the Cathedral at the age of twelve or thirteen. The specific lines containing footfall open Burnt Norton:
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know.
“The Ancient of Days” (frontispiece to Europe A Prophecy, 1794) by William Blake (1757-1827) The William Blake Archive
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), and Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) may be obscure names to many, and their writings equally impenetrable, but they are nonetheless important to numerous academic disciplines, many of which I study. Consequently, many of the scholarly tomes and articles I read frequently mention these gentlemen, with whom I have thus become somewhat acquainted.
This past week, I have been revisiting The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton University Press, 2013) by Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997). The aforementioned scholars make their obligatory appearances, as do men more famous and more obscure. It was, however, when Berlin sought to set the stage for a lesser-known figure by discussing the genesis of the Pietist movement in the German lands in the 17th and 18th centuries, that the inspiration for today’s post took root.
Berlin, prone to sweeping observations—both historical and psychological—offers fascinating insights into the rise of the Pietist movement, insights that merit reflection and may well extend to contemporary parallels. He posits that, during this era, German culture was largely provincialized: “There was no Paris, there was no centre, there was no life, there was no pride, there was no sense of growth, dynamism and power. German culture drifted either into extreme scholastic pedantry of a Lutheran kind—minute but rather dry scholarship—or in the direction of the inner life of the human soul. This was no doubt stimulated by Lutheranism as such, but particularly by the fact that there was a kind of huge national inferiority complex, which began at that period, vis-à-vis the French, this brilliant glittering State which had managed to crush and humiliate this great country which dominated the science and the arts, and all the provinces of human life, with a kind of arrogance and success unexampled hitherto” (Berlin, 42).
Berlin then notes that the Pietist movement, a branch of Lutheranism, became deeply embedded in the German lands. He describes the movement as possessing a passion for a meticulous study of the Bible, a profound respect for the personal relationship between man and God, an emphasis on the spiritual life, and a contempt for learning, ritual, and form. Moreover, the movement placed “tremendous stress upon the individual relationship of the suffering human soul with its maker” (Berlin, 43).
Berlin does not mince words in his assessment of the outcome:
“This was a very grand form of sour grapes. If you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth, into a kind of inner citadel, in which you try to lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world. The king of my province—the prince—confiscates my land: I do not want to own land. The prince does not wish to give me rank: rank is trivial, unimportant. The king has robbed me of my possessions: possessions are nothing. My children have died of malnutrition and disease: earthly attachments, even love of children, are as nothing before love of God. And so forth. You gradually hedge yourself round with a kind of tight wall by which you seek to reduce your vulnerable surface—you want to be as little wounded as possible. Every kind of wound has been heaped upon you, and therefore you wish to contract yourself into the smallest possible area, so that as little of you as possible is exposed to further wounds.” He concludes that “[t]his is the mood in which the German Pietists operated” (Berlin, 44).
The above is striking, as it applies, in my view, to many historical, contemporary, and even personal scenarios. For the latter, I need only consider my post entitled Poetic Reflections: Exploring the Fortress of the Mind. Indeed, I see connections and relevance everywhere.
Northcoast Antiquarian 