A Cautionary Tale
Two Khorasani dervishes were traveling together. One of them, because he fasted for two days at a time, was weak. The other ate three meals a day and was correspondingly strong. They came to a town where they were arrested at the gates on suspicion of spying. Their captors threw them into separate cells, the doors of which were then walled up with mud bricks. The dervishes’ innocence was not proven until two weeks later, but when the doors were opened, the stronger man was discovered to have died, while the weak man had survived.
The townspeople were surprised, but a wise man among them pointed out that the opposite circumstance would have been even more surprising. The one who’d eaten three meals a day died because he lacked the wherewithal to withstand the hunger his captivity forced upon him. The weaker dervish survived because his habit of fasting prepared him for that hunger.
A man whose appetite is very small
will not be overwhelmed by any hardship,
but a man who thinks that eating signifies
his wealth—if hardship overtakes him, he’ll die.
—from Golestan by Saadi of Shiraz, translated by Edward Rehatsek and Richard Jeffrey Newman
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I'm a poet and essayist. I write about poetry, writing, and translation; gender and sexuality; Jewish identity and culture; and the politics of higher education.
