What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.
Seneca
qaid-e-hayaat-o-band-e-gham
asl men dono ek hain.
maut se pahale aadamii
gham se nijaat paaye kyuun
qaid-e-hayaat : prison of life
band-e-Gam : bindings/chains of sorrow
najaat : freedom/liberation
The prison of life and the chains of sorrow are actually same(they go together)
Then why should a man expect to be free from sorrows before his death
Mirza Ghalib
Two gentlemen separated by almost 1800 years. The latter probably had never heard of the former. Yet they are expressing pretty much the same idea..
On the contrary, I think they both convey two completely different things. Former sees life as misery, latter talks about not to stop living life before you physically die.
ReplyDeletePoles apart.
Or did I interpret it wrongly? :-)
The interpretation is probably correct, but only as far as Ghalib is concerned. There is a still a lot of similarity between the two.
DeleteBoth of them agree on the fact that sorrow is inevitable throughout one's life. This is the similarity I wrote about. Whether they have different opinions about how to deal with this, is a matter of debate. I think they have similarities there too.
Seneca's thoughts appear the way you describe, only if seen without the context. The quote is actually from a letter he wrote to a Roman mother who had lost her young son in battle. Apparently, she had stopped eating and drinking out of sorrow and seemed to have given up on life. Seneca, being a stoic, asks her (via a long detour into philosophy) to acknowledge that life is going to have sorrows due to things out of your control (he attributed it to the whims of the Fortune Goddess). He advocates accepting this fact and continue living one's life (stoically, of course).
Ghalib being a poet, is more vague. 'Dil hi to hai' seems more about accepting vulnerability and letting oneself cry, literally too. I would like to interpret his words in the way you describe, simply because it is less depressing. But one can't be too sure that he means that andnot just more moping. The vagueness leaves some scope to wonder whether he really wants to move on and live his life.
On a scale of effective advice to help move on, I would rate Seneca higher than Ghalib.
Here's the link to the letter. http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Marcia.html
Delete:-) will check out the letter.
ReplyDeleteI don't quite understand poetry. which is surprising because I tend to be quite vague myself.
Also, any such similarities in finding happiness/love in life? :-)
I thought I didn't understand it either. I used to be very anguished that other people praised a particular poem (on some blogs) which had little to no effect on me. I was told that you either 'get' poetry or you don't. It is to be felt. I believed that.
DeleteBut now I think that is bullshit. Quality is something universal. There's a reason why some works are universally acknowledged as gems. Mozart, Ghalib, Yeats, Pt. Bhimsen Joshi..their work has quality. You don't need any special poetic/artistic sense to appreciate it. But there are nuances to these ideas. Maybe another blog post.
I don't know if Ghalib wrote about finding happiness/love in life.