The man who was tired of life
Translation by R O Faulkner
[...] you in order to say [...] their [tongues] cannot question, for it will be crookedness [...] payments their tongues cannot question.
I opened my mouth to my soul, that I might answer what it had said: / This is too much for me today, that my soul does not argue with me; it is too great for [exaggeration], it is as if one ignored me. Let my soul not depart, that it may attend to it for me [...] in my body like a net of cord, / but it will not succeed in escaping the day of trouble. See, my soul misleads me, but I do not listen to it; draws me toward death ere have come to it and casts
What my soul said to me: Are you not a man? Indeed you are alive, but what do you profit? Yet you yearn for life like a man of wealth.
I said: I have not gone, (even though) that is on the ground. Indeed, you leap away, but you will / not be cared for. Every prisoner says: "I will take you," but you are dead, though your name lives. Yonder is a resting place attractive to the heart; the West is a dwelling place, rowing [...] face. If my guiltless soul listens to me / and its heart is in accord with me, it will be fortunate, for I will cause it to attain the West, like one who is in his pyramid, to whose burial a survivor attended. I will [...over] your corpse, so that you make another soul envious / in weariness. I will...., then you will not be cold, so that you make envious another soul which is hot. I will drink water at the eddy, I will raise up shade so that you make envious another soul which is hungry. If/ you hold me back from death in this manner, you will find nowhere you can rest in the West. Be so kind, my soul, my brother, as to become my heir who shall make offering and stand at the tomb on the day of burial, that he may prepare a bier / for the necropolis.
My soul opened its mouth to me that it might answer what I had said: If you think of burial, it is a sad matter; it is a bringer of weeping through making a man miserable; it is taking a man from his house, he being cast on the high ground, never again will you go up that you may see / the sun. those who built in granite and constructed halls in goodly pyramids with fine work, when the builders became gods their stelae were destroyed, like the weary ones who died on the riverbank through lack of a survivor, / the flood having taken its toll and the sun likewise to whom talk the fishes of the banks of the water. Listen to me; behold it is good for men to hear. Follow the happy day and forget care.
A peasant ploughed his plot and loaded his harvest / aboard a ship, towing it when his time of festival drew near. He saw the coming of the darkness of the norther, for he was vigilant in the boat when the sun set. He escaped with his wife and children, but came to grief on a lake infested by / night with crocodiles. At last he sat down and broke silence, saying: I weep not for yonder mother, who has no more going forth from the West for another (term) upon earth; I sorrow rather for her children broken in the egg, who have looked in the face of the crocodile god / ere they have lived.
A peasant asked for a meal, and his wife said to him: There is <...> for supper. he went out to... for a moment and returned to his house (raging) as if he were an ape. His wife reasoned with him, but he would not listen to her, he.... and the bystanders were helpless.
I opened my mouth to my soul that I might answer what it had said:
Behold, my name is detested, Behold, more than the smell of vultures On a summer's day when the sky is hot.
Behold, my name is detested, Behold,
Behold, my name is detested, Behold, more than the smell of ducks, More than a covert of reeds full of waterfowl.
Behold, my name is detested, Behold, more than the smell of fishermen, More than the creeks / of the marshes where they have fished.
Behold, my name is detested, Behold, more than the smell of crocodiles, More than sitting by sandbanks full of crocodiles.
Behold, my name is detested, Behold, more than a woman About whom lies are told to a man.
Behold, / my name is detested, Behold, more than a sturdy child Of whom it is said: "he belongs to his rival."
Behold, my name is detested, Behold,
To whom can I speak today? Brothers are evil And the friends of today unlovable.
To whom can I speak / today? Hearts are rapacious And everyone takes his neighbor's goods.
To whom can I speak today? Men are contented with evil And goodness is neglected everywhere.
To whom can I speak / Today? He who should enrage a man by his ill deeds, he makes everyone laugh
To whom can I speak today? Men plunder And every man robs his neighbor.
To whom can I speak today? The wrongdoer is an intimate friend And the brother with whom one used to act is become / an enemy.
To whom can I speak today? None remember the past, And no one now helps him who used to do (good).
To whom can I speak today? Brothers are evil, And men have recourse to strangers for affection.
To whom can I speak today? Faces are averted, And every man looks askance at / his brethren.
To whom can I speak today? Hearts are rapacious And there is no man's heart in which one can trust.
To whom can I speak today? There are no just persons And the land is left over to the doers of wrong.
To whom can I speak today? There is a lack of an intimate friend And men have recourse to someone unknown / in order to complain to him.
To whom can I speak today? There is no contented man, And that person who once walked with him no longer exists.
To whom can I speak today? I am heavy-laden with trouble Through lack of an intimate friend.
To whom can I speak today? The wrong which roams the earth, / There is no end to it.
Death is in my sight today
Death is in my sight today Like the smell of myrrh, Like sitting under an awning on a windy day.
Death is in my sight today / Like the perfume of lotuses, Like sitting on the shore of the Land of Drunkenness.
Death is in my sight today Like a trodden way, As when a man returns home from an expedition.
Death is in my sight today Like the clearing of the sky, Like a man who.../... for something which he does not know.
Death is in my sight today. As when a man desires to see home When he has spent many years in captivity.
Verily, he who is yonder will be a living god, Averting the ill of him who does it.
Verily, he who is yonder will be one who stands in the Bark of the Sun, Causing choice things to be given / therefrom for the temples.
Verily, he who is yonder will be a sage Who will not be prevented from appealing to Re when he speaks.
What my soul said to me: Cast complaint upon the peg, my comrade and brother; make offering on the brazier / and cleave to life, according as I have said. Desire me here, thrust the West aside, but desire that you may attain the West when your body goes to earth, that I may alight after you are weary; then will we make an abode together.
It is finished / from its beginning to its end, just as it was found in writing.
Commentary
This most excellent and sublime of Egyptian texts is written in a poetical style in the form of a discourse between a man and his soul over the age old theme of self-destruction.
Suicide, Self-Slaughter, the inquities of life are here dealt with from the perspective of an Ancient Egyptian who seeing his life eclipsed,is in inner turmoil.
Written perhaps in the second intermediate period, a time of chaos, the loss of Maat , a time of despair, it calls out us today with relevance for us all.
The man here portayed, is shown by means of an internal dialogue raging in his mind to be asking of himself, Hamlets dilemna, ' to be or not to be' .
The arguement is between his inner voices, the man, which we can read as the conscious mind or ego-self, and the soul, in my interpretation, his sub-conscious mind.
His soul then appears to react to the obvious distress his conscious mind is perceiving.
The impulses from the soul urge both death and life, as does the man hmself, each counters the others arguement and this leads to much vacillation. After a futile dialogue with his soul, the man embarks on a series of moving stanzas, illustrating why death is preferrable to living. He compares death to the delights of a lost lifestyle, now seemingly just a memory.
At one point, his soul mocks him for desiring life like a man of wealth, showing us that this man has lost all his wealth. The man argues against the soul, just as earlier , he berates his soul for keeping him alive !!
We can deduce from this, that although death appears to be the way out of his problems, he can't quite convince himself to go ahead and do that.
Indeed, all of us might accept that life is an absurdity, evem more so when it appears to offer little other than pain of one sort or another.
What keeps us alive then when faced with many and great problems, fear of Death ?
how to die ? or perhaps a biological prgramme which prevents self-destruction to ensure the survival of the species. As is only too clear, many have been able to overcome such a biological progamme.
It is said that if you don't want to die, then you should never have been born. This somewhat difficult given that we don't have any choice in this matter.I apreciate the paradox here
Death of course is inevitable, whether you go early or not, so in that sense does in really matter, well yes it does, we chose life because we have hope in something better, no matter how bad it is today. Tomorrow, well who knows, maybe the sun will shine again.
Our Egyptian friend, eventaully wins his own arguement: he must if he is to recieve proper funeral rites and burial. Although at one point in the text, we can note that he compares the fate of those who were buried in pyramids to those who were thrown in the river for the fishes, a bitter irony here.
Although man and soul are eventually reconciled, that is his mind calms itself enough to enable him to choose life and a natural death as in " desire death may come when it does". He earlier again berated his soul for being too "stupid to ease (?) misery in life".
We have seen that the text is fragmented in places, esp the beginning where much of the souls speech is lost, it is more or less complete and most readable. Here and there, some of the sentances may appear to be incomprehensible to us. However this in no way detracts from it's sublimity.
Suicide was a tabboo topic, however I feel no reluctance in raising the issue.
Once born, a man lives to die. Should he have the right to go early, well that is for each individual to decide. I am not a stranger to the concept of self-destructon.
Inded, Albert Camus once wrote that suicide was the only serious philosophical question. Judging whether life is worth living or not amounts to answering the fundemental question of philosophy. In Camus' opinion, all other questions of philosophy-whether the world had three dimensions or not etc etc come afterward.
Living naturally invloves a great deal of pain, it's never easy, and at times, it is certainly unbearable. Camus thought that a man kills himself because simply put ,life has be deemed not to worth living. I would not contest this argument. As to what keeps me going at this extremely difficult stage of my life, I am not quite sure, except to say that the spark of life in me is strong otherwise , I might not be writing this today. Camus also thought that what precipated a crisis which ends in death is unverifable. Perhaps after suffering unduly and even coping with this, at the end it is some small event which triggers the destructon of the self.
Schopenhaeur , wrote the following :
" Far from being denial of the will, suicide is a phemomena of the will's strong affirmation. For denial has it's essential nature in the fact that the pleasures
of life, not it's sorrows are shunned. The suicide wills life, and is dissatisfied merely with the conditions on which it has come to him.
Therfore he gives up by no means the will to live, merely to life, since he destroys the individual phenomenon". (W1, 398)
I other words, if I regard the pleasures of life as of positive value, despite it's pains. I always run the risk that that life's pains will come to outweigh it's pleasures. If I come to believe that only suffering is available, the solution is to stop living. Whatever the truth, and in philosophy we can conjecture endlessly. It is apparent that personal diasters from which no recovery is seen as possible is the root of the suicide.
One could be tempted to read this text in a symbolic manner, ie the Man has no concept of self until the crisis comes upon him. Many of us, no doubt until we experience internal conflict, are unaware of the difference betwen Ego adapted self and the inner self (soul). The crisis brings these issues into focus.
It may well be that ultimatley, the soul favours the death experience to usher in change. The Siren call of the Ego to destroy itself because of it's frustrated aims and so desires to take the whole person with it. Suicide is unlikly to be the descision of the Soul, it is that of Ego. The suicidal tendency becomes dangerous when the Ego takes up it's own suggestion logically. This Egyptian then
has managed to allow his soul finally to overule his Ego.
My own take on this is this, I will die, I will be reborn, this is inevitable. Therfore, in order to live better next time, I have to accrue Good Karma, and that means living life out to whatever end the Cosmos has decreed for me. For life is governed by the Cosmic Order, and I simply dance to the Cosmic Rythmm .
Ian Alex Blease
29 Nov 2002
