Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Fitzgerald

Death is framed here not as tragedy but as an information blackout, and that’s what gives Fitzgerald’s quatrain its chill. He stages mortality as a logistical problem: “myriads” have already gone through the “door of Darkness,” yet the living are left with zero usable intelligence about the route. The tone isn’t devotional; it’s dryly incredulous, almost conversational in its opening (“Strange, is it not?”), which makes the cosmic void feel like a cheeky bureaucratic oversight. Everyone’s taken the trip. Nobody’s filed a report.

The intent is less to mourn than to puncture our craving for certainty. Fitzgerald’s most pointed move is the word “Road” - a metaphor that promises directions, landmarks, maybe even a map. Then he denies all of it. We “must travel too,” not because it’s noble or meaningful, but because it’s mandatory. The subtext is skepticism toward the afterlife industry: doctrines, seances, and moral accounting systems that claim insider knowledge about what lies beyond. If the evidence base is nothing, why are we so confident?

Context matters: Fitzgerald is best known for his Victorian-era rendering of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a work steeped in elegiac doubt and pleasures taken under the shadow of annihilation. This stanza shares that posture. It’s not nihilism for sport; it’s a controlled, lucid stare at the one experience everyone shares and no one can narrate. The wit is in the understatement, the provocation in the silence: the universe offers inevitability without explanation, and we keep pretending it owes us one.