"I come like Water, and like Wind I go"
About this Quote
A whole philosophy of impermanence slips in on two simple similes: water’s arrival and wind’s disappearance. Fitzgerald makes the self feel less like a solid “I” and more like a passing element, something that can be sensed but not held. The line works because it refuses the usual Victorian urge to fix identity in moral certainty or social position. Instead, it offers a speaker who is defined by motion: entering as something necessary and life-giving, leaving as something untamable and untraceable.
Water suggests inevitability and consequence. It comes when it comes; it seeps, floods, nourishes, erodes. To “come like Water” is to admit you don’t arrive as a tidy narrative but as a force that changes the ground you touch. Wind, by contrast, is pure exit: you know it by what it stirs, not by what it leaves behind. “Like Wind I go” isn’t melodrama; it’s a cool vanishing act, a rejection of legacy-as-monument in favor of influence-as-ripple.
The context matters: Fitzgerald is best known for his idiosyncratic, era-defining translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a work steeped in Persian-inflected fatalism, pleasure, and skepticism about permanence. This line rides that same current. It’s not begging for meaning; it’s warning you not to overinvest in permanence. The subtext is quietly radical: accept transience, and you free yourself from the desperate performance of being “someone” forever.
Water suggests inevitability and consequence. It comes when it comes; it seeps, floods, nourishes, erodes. To “come like Water” is to admit you don’t arrive as a tidy narrative but as a force that changes the ground you touch. Wind, by contrast, is pure exit: you know it by what it stirs, not by what it leaves behind. “Like Wind I go” isn’t melodrama; it’s a cool vanishing act, a rejection of legacy-as-monument in favor of influence-as-ripple.
The context matters: Fitzgerald is best known for his idiosyncratic, era-defining translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a work steeped in Persian-inflected fatalism, pleasure, and skepticism about permanence. This line rides that same current. It’s not begging for meaning; it’s warning you not to overinvest in permanence. The subtext is quietly radical: accept transience, and you free yourself from the desperate performance of being “someone” forever.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
|---|---|
| Source | Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (translation by Edward FitzGerald) — quatrain often rendered "I came like Water, and like Wind I go." |
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