Old Man Koheleth

him, and yet he is there. And as surely as food gives a fragrance and drums resound, Koheleth gives us his own particular light, whether he is one or many men, whether the page has felt the point of one or many pens. It seems to me that the mystery of who or what he was, and where or how he wrote is one of those blank pages in our knowledge which would not make too much difference if it were full. To say that there was no Koheleth is like saying there was no Rodin. We could argue from now for a century that Rodin never lived, and still we have his musical flowing marbles, his stricken Eve, his massive Balzac, his sweet spindly Jesus. Koheleth, illusive and fantastic and quixotic though he may be, has entrenched himself firmly in our life and background, and we may challenge his right to sit there, but he goes right on sitting. He, or it or they, belongs to us, and the warring philosophies tied into the few pages of the book of Ecclesiastes exist to contradict and augment each other and intrigue the critics and yet there is a completeness in the thing. It was a chill summer evening, with a fire in the grate, and everything still, when I had my first contact with Koheleth. The small girl I was taking care of had put her blocks away and been tucked into bed, and now I was alone waiting for her parents to come home. I wandered over to the bookcase and took down a book. It looked rather occult-at least the title of it was strange to me, Koheleth. An odd name. It sounded vaguely suggestive of the eastern mystics. The binding was new, and I opened the book. And then I spent a fascinating evening. A new character was unravelled before me as the author, whom I later found out to be Jastrow, quoted that strange book of the Bible, and explained the different threads of personality that seemed to live in the book. The poetry was beautiful, and it did not sound musty and deistic, as I had imagined the Bible would. There was something real in the despair reflected here.

American Political and Social Dynamics · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · History · Philosophy · Torture, Ethics, and Law

• Ethnomathematics

  Open Access•Marcia Ascher, Robert Ascher•History of Science•1986

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