Ecclesiastes 11:8

But if a man live many years Better, For if a man… The relation is one of connexion rather than contrast. In the calm, enjoyable because beneficent, life which the thinker now contemplates as within his reach, the remembrance of the darkness which lies beyond is to be a motive, not for a fretful pessimism, but for a deliberate effort to enjoy rightly. The figure of a corpse which was carried about in the banquets of the Egyptians was intended not to destroy or damp the joy, but to make it more lasting by making it more controlled (Herod. ii. 78). The teaching now is something more than the "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die" of the sensualist (Wis 2:1-6; 1 Corinthians 15:32). "Respice finem; Memento mori," these rules teach us to use life wisely and therefore well.

let him remember the days of darkness These are clearly not the days of sorrow or adversity (though the phrase as such might admit that meaning), but those of the darkness which is contrasted with the light of the sun, with the light of life, the land that lies behind the veil, in the unseen world of Hades or of Sheol, the darkness of the valley of the shadow of death. As the Greeks spoke of the dead as οἱ πλείονες "the many," so does the writer speak of the days after death as "many." The night will be long and dreary, therefore it is well to make the most of the day. The teaching of the whole verse finds, as might be expected, an echo in that of the Epicurean poet, when he greets his friend on the return of spring, but the echo is in a lower key.

Nunc decet aut viridi nitidum caput impedire myrto

Aut flore, terræ quem ferunt solutæ,

Pallida Mors æquo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas

Regumque turres. O beate Sexti,

Vitæ summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam,

Jam te premet nox, fabulæque Manes

Et domus exilis Plutonia.

"Now is it meet to crown bright brow

With wreaths of fresh green myrtle; now.

With flowers that owe their timely birth

To spring's soft influence o'er the earth.

With equal foot the pauper's cell

Death visits, and where emperors dwell,

Wherefore my Sextus, good and dear,

Life's little span forbids us here

To start, if we indeed are wise,

On some far-reaching enterprise:

Soon Night and fabled forms of dread,

Where Pluto lords it o'er the dead,

Shall meet thee in thy narrow bed."

Hor. Od.i. 4.

All that cometh is vanity There is a significance in the new form of the burden of the Debater's song. The sentence of "vanity," i.e.of shadowy transitoriness, is passed not only on the years in which he is, in a measure, capable of enjoyment, and on the days of darkness, but even on that which lies beyond them. The unknown future the undiscovered country it was, from the point of view from which, for the time, he looked at it, "vanity" to build too much even on that. Men speculated much and knew but little, and there was an unreality in sacrificing the present to that undefined future. What has been called "other-worldliness," involving the contempt at once of the duties and enjoyments of this world, was but a form of unwisdom. Asceticism, looking to that other world, needed to be balanced by the better form of Epicureanism.