A Man Doesn't Have Time in His Life
A Man Doesn't Have Time in His Life - meaning Summary
Limited Time, Simultaneous States
The poem argues that human life is too short to experience things in neat, separate seasons. Amichai presents paradoxes—loving and hating, laughing and crying, making love in war—showing how people must hold conflicting actions and feelings together as history unfolds slowly. The soul becomes practiced at this complexity while the body remains clumsy and pleasure-seeking. The closing fig image compresses mortality: brief, sweet, and ultimately limited.
Read Complete AnalysesA man doesn't have time in his life to have time for everything. He doesn't have seasons enough to have a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes Was wrong about that. A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment, to laugh and cry with the same eyes, with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them, to make love in war and war in love. And to hate and forgive and remember and forget, to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest what history takes years and years to do. A man doesn't have time. When he loses he seeks, when he finds he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves he begins to forget. And his soul is seasoned, his soul is very professional. Only his body remains forever an amateur. It tries and it misses, gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing, drunk and blind in its pleasures and its pains. He will die as figs die in autumn, Shriveled and full of himself and sweet, the leaves growing dry on the ground, the bare branches pointing to the place where there's time for everything.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.