I’ve read the book twice in the past week, and I’m gearing up to read it twice more, if I can stand the abrasion. Ecclesiastes rubs across the mind like steel wool, and leaves one feeling alive—if very small and slightly bloodied.
Solomon’s acerbic wit is like a shiny glove on a sinewy fist; his unsparing intellect catches your eye—just before it bludgeons you. By the time you see what he’s saying, it’s too late to jump back. He melds depth of thought with economy of language, and then rams it through your chest:
All the rivers flow into the sea, but the sea never fills up. The rivers keep flowing to the same old place, and then start all over and do it again. Everything's boring, utterly boring—no one can find any meaning in it. Boring to the eye, boring to the ear. (Ecclesiastes 1:7-8, The Message)
The king doesn’t stop with life’s monotony, though. He also sounds the depths of human ignorance, the futility of the search for wisdom, and God’s ultimate inscrutability. To sum it all up, he says that life is—in a word—smoke.
I can hear the crashing as popular illusions collapse around me.
But at the same time, I know this is good. Saying that we “should read Ecclesiastes with a grain of salt” fails to do justice to the book, which is squarely within the biblical canon. In a literal sense, Solomon’s list of vanities holds true, and ought to be hung on the walls of swank apartments everywhere. We all need to have our pretensions razed to the ground so that real life can break the surface. Before joy can arrive, we need to come to terms with the bitter.
Ecclesiastes doesn’t detail the sweet, much less the paradoxical joys found even in monotony—but undeniably, the book clears the air. Read it slowly (even once), read it seriously, and you won’t take yourself so seriously that you miss the obvious. Ironically, the first step toward breathing in a smoky life is to perceive the smoke.
2 comments:
Amazing picture!
To be sure, I thank you.
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