Life's Pleasures Quote by Edward Fitzgerald

Time is doing what it always does: leaking, not marching. Fitzgerald’s line catches mortality in two small, domestic motions - oozing and falling - and the genius is how unheroic they feel. No drumbeat, no epic countdown. Life diminishes the way a bottle empties when you’re not watching, the way leaves detach without drama. The intent isn’t to moralize; it’s to reframe the reader’s sense of urgency. You don’t lose your life in one catastrophic event. You misplace it in ordinary units.

The pairing is sly. “Wine” implies pleasure, intoxication, even sacred communion; “leaves” suggests natural cycles, seasons, the visible evidence of decline. Fitzgerald yokes indulgence to decay: the very thing that makes living feel rich is also what gets spent. “Keeps oozing” has a faintly sensual, faintly grotesque texture - not the clean pour of a toast, but a slow seep that hints at waste. Meanwhile, “falling one by one” makes mortality countable, almost administrative, as if the universe is tallying you.

Context matters: Fitzgerald is the English translator-adaptor who made The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam a Victorian phenomenon, packaging Persian quatrains into a voice that fit mid-19th-century doubt. Beneath the elegance sits a culturally specific anxiety: a modernizing Britain, a loosening faith, the suspicion that meaning isn’t guaranteed. So the subtext lands as both invitation and warning: savor, yes - but don’t pretend the bottle isn’t draining.