Everything Is a Breath

There was once a man who tried everything. He was a king in Jerusalem, a son of David, and he had money enough to buy whatever he wanted and time enough to think about it afterward. He calls himself the Gatherer — the one who calls people together and tells them what he has found out. What he found out is the first thing he says, and he says it before he explains anything: “A breath. A breath. All of it is a breath.” The word he uses means the little puff of white you can see on a cold morning when you breathe out. It is really there. You can watch it. And then you cannot, because it is gone, and you could not have held on to it however hard you tried. That is the word he puts on everything.

Then he looks around at the world, and it is going in circles. “One generation goes and another comes, and the earth stays where it is. The sun comes up and the sun goes down, and hurries back to the place where it comes up. The wind goes round to the south and round to the north, round and round, and comes back to where it started. All the rivers run into the sea, and the sea is never full; the rivers go back to the place they came from.” “Everything is tiring. Nobody can say all of it. The eye is not filled up with looking and the ear is not filled up with hearing. What has happened is what will happen. There is nothing new under the sun.” Somebody will point at a thing and say, look, that is new. It was already here, he says, long before us. And nobody remembers the people who came before, and nobody will remember us either.

So he set out to find something that lasted, and he was rich enough to try all of it. “I built houses for myself. I planted vineyards. I made gardens and orchards and planted every kind of fruit tree in them, and I dug pools of water to water a wood full of growing timber. I bought slaves, and slaves were born in my house. I had more herds and flocks than anybody in Jerusalem before me. I gathered silver and gold and the treasures of kings. I got singers, men and women. I did not keep my eyes from anything they wanted.” “Then I looked at everything my hands had made and at all the work it took, and there it was: all of it a breath, and chasing after wind. Nothing gained, under the sun.” He tried being clever instead. He learned more than anybody in the city before him. That was better, he says — wisdom is better than being a fool the way light is better than dark, because the wise man has his eyes in his head and the fool walks along in the dark. But it did not settle the thing either. “The same end comes to them both. Nobody remembers the wise man any longer than the fool. In the days coming, all of it is forgotten. So how does the wise man die exactly like the fool?”

He got to hating his work, because he had to leave it to whoever came after him, and he had no idea whether that person would be wise or foolish, and it would all be theirs anyway. A man works with his head and his hands and his courage, and hands the whole pile to somebody who never lifted a finger for it. His days are full of aches and his nights will not let him rest. And then, in the middle of that, he says a small plain thing that he keeps coming back to: “There is nothing better for a person than to eat and drink and find something good in his work. I saw that even this comes out of God’s hand.”

Then he lists the times. “For everything there is a time, and a season for every matter under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to pull up what was planted. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to build. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to throw stones away and a time to gather stones. A time to hold somebody and a time to keep your arms down. A time to look for something and a time to let it go. A time to keep and a time to throw out. A time to tear and a time to sew. A time to be quiet and a time to speak. A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace.” “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has put the whole stretch of time inside people’s hearts — and still a person cannot find out the work God has done from the beginning of it to the end.”

He is honest about the dark places too. He saw crooked judges sitting in the place where fair judges should sit. He saw that people and animals go the same way in the end: one breath in all of them, and all of them going back to the dust they came out of. Who knows, he says, which way the breath goes afterward? He saw that the same thing happens to the good person and to the bad one, and it is one of the worst things about the world. And still, he says, anybody who is alive has hope, because a living dog is better off than a dead lion.

And out of the middle of all that, he says this, and it is not a joke: “Go on, then. Eat your bread and be glad about it, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart, because God has already accepted what you do. Wear white clothes. Do not let the oil run out on your head. Enjoy your life with the wife you love, all the days of this breath of a life you have been given. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your strength.”

He watched who wins and who does not, and it did not come out tidy. “The race does not go to the fast, or the battle to the strong, or bread to the wise, or riches to the clever, or favor to the ones who know things. Time and chance happen to them all.” He tells a small story about that. There was once a little town with hardly anybody in it, and a great king came and surrounded it and built siege works against it. Inside the town was a poor man, and he was wise, and by his wisdom he saved the whole town. And not one person remembered him afterward. So the Gatherer says: wisdom is better than strength, even when the poor man’s wisdom is laughed at and nobody listens. A quiet word from a wise man is worth more than a ruler shouting among fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war — and one person doing wrong can spoil a great deal of good.

He goes on thinking like this, and his sayings are the same kind: two people are better off than one, because if one falls the other can pull him up, and a rope of three strands does not snap easily. God is in heaven and you are down here, so let your words be few. Whoever loves silver never has enough silver. A good name is worth more than expensive perfume. Do not curse the king even inside your own head, because a bird of the sky may carry your voice.

Near the end he starts giving instructions, and they are simple ones. “Send your bread out over the water; after a good many days you will find it again. Give a share to seven people, and to eight, because you do not know what trouble is coming on the earth. Whoever keeps watching the wind will never sow, and whoever keeps studying the clouds will never reap. You do not know which way the wind goes, or how the bones grow inside a mother — and you do not know the work of God, who makes everything. So sow your seed in the morning, and do not let your hand stop in the evening, because you do not know which of them will do well, this one or that one, or whether both will be good.” “Light is sweet, and it is a good thing for the eyes to see the sun.”

And then he turns and talks straight to a young person, and this is the closest he ever comes to shouting: “Be glad, young man, while you are young. Let your heart cheer you up in the days of your youth. Walk where your heart takes you and where your eyes look — and know that God will bring you to account for all of it. Take the anger out of your heart and put evil away from your body.” “Remember the one who made you, while you are young — before the hard days come, and the years arrive when you will say, I do not enjoy these; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars go dark, and the clouds come back after the rain.”

Then he says what growing old is like, and he says it in riddles, the way you would describe a house that is closing up for the last time. “In the day when the keepers of the house shake, and the strong men bend over; when the women grinding at the mill stop, because there are only a few of them left, and the ones who look out of the windows go dim; when the doors onto the street are shut, and the sound of the grinding gets faint, and a man wakes up at a sparrow, and all the daughters of song are brought low; when high places frighten you and there are terrors in the road, and the almond tree turns white, and the locust drags itself along, and nobody wants the caper berry any more — because a man is going to his everlasting house, and the mourners are already walking round the market.” “Before the silver cord is let go and the golden bowl is broken; before the jar is smashed at the spring and the wheel is broken at the well; before the dust goes back to the earth the way it was, and the breath goes back to God, who gave it.” “A breath. All of it a breath.”

And at the end of it somebody else had a few words to say about him. Besides being wise himself, he says, the Gatherer taught the people what he knew, and he weighed his words and set his sayings in order, and looked hard for words that would please, and what he wrote down was straight and true. The words of the wise are like the sharp stick a farmer uses to move his oxen along, and like nails hammered in and left there. And, he warns: there is no end to the making of books, my son, and too much study wears the body out. Then he says two last things. “The end of the matter, now you have heard everything: fear God and keep his commands. This is the whole of a person.” “For God will bring every deed into judgment — including every hidden thing, whether it is good or whether it is evil.”