Annemarie Schimmel

Although it seems that the time of learning might now draw to a close, yet I understand that every moment—even the most unpleasant one—teaches me something and that every experience should be incorporated into my life to enrich it. For there is no end to learning as there is no end to life, and when Iqbal says in a daring formulation: “Heaven is no holiday!” he expresses the view, dear to Goethe and other thinkers, that even eternal life will be a constant process of growing, and, that is, of learning—learning in whatever mysterious way something about the unfathomable mysteries of the Divine, which manifests itself under various signs. Suffering, too, is part of it; and the most difficult task in life is to learn patience.

Learning is, to me, transforming knowledge and experience into wisdom and love, to mature—as according to Oriental lore, the ordinary pebble can turn into a ruby provided it patiently takes into itself the rays of the sun, shedding its own blood in a supreme sacrifice. Perhaps a few lines which I once wrote after visiting Maulana Rumi’s mausoleum in Konya can express what learning means to me:

Never will you reach that silver mountain
which appears like a cloud of joy in the evening light.
Never can you cross that lake of salt
which treacherously smiles at you in the morning mist.
Every step on this road takes you farther away from home,
from flowers, from spring.
Sometimes the shade of a cloud will dance on the road,
sometimes you rest in a ruined caravansary,
seeking the Truth from the blackish tresses of smoke,
sometimes you walk a few steps with a kindred soul
only to lose him again.
You go and go, torn by the wind,
burnt by the sun and the shepherd’s flute tells you “the Path in blood”.
until you cry no more,
until the lake of salt,is only your dried-up tears which mirror the mountain of joy
that is closer to you than your heart.