Nezahualcoyotl · Philosophy
The impermanence that runs through the songs attributed to Nezahualcoyotl: ‘Not forever on earth, only a little while here.’ Even jade shatters, even gold breaks, even quetzal plumes are torn - and so must every human being and every human work.
One line sounds through the Nezahualcoyotl tradition like a struck bell: not forever on earth, only a little while here (in Nahuatl, roughly zan achica ye nican, ‘only a short time here’). It is the tradition’s deepest theme. Every beautiful thing, every powerful person, every kingdom and friendship and song, is on loan for a moment and then must go. This is not a passing mood in the songs; it is their governing insight, returned to again and again from every angle. The Nahua sages looked hard at the fact that most of us spend our lives avoiding - that we are here briefly and then not at all - and refused to look away. The songs make you sit with it. And out of that unflinching attention they built, not a philosophy of despair, but a way of holding life that we will trace across this lesson: an intensity of gratitude that only the sense of loss makes possible.
The Nahua sense of transience was not merely a poet’s melancholy; it grew from the culture’s picture of the cosmos itself. In Nahua myth, the present world is the age of the ‘Fifth Sun,’ and it is not the first: four earlier worlds, each with its own sun, had already been created and violently destroyed - by jaguars, by wind, by fiery rain, by flood. The current age, born at Teotihuacan through the gods’ self-sacrifice, was believed to be destined to end too, torn apart by catastrophic earthquakes. The universe, in other words, was itself impermanent, running on borrowed time, sustained only by ritual and destined to fall. If even the sun and the earth are provisional, doomed things, then the fragility of a human life is no exception to the order of the world; it is a faithful copy of it. The songs’ meditation on the passing of jade and gold and princes is the human-scale echo of a cosmos the Nahua believed was built, from the beginning, to end.
What gives the transience songs their peculiar power is that they hold grief and gratitude in the same hand and will not let either cancel the other. They do not deny the sorrow of loss with forced cheer, nor do they collapse into pure lament. Read one closely and you feel it move, sometimes within a single line, from the ache of ‘we shall have to leave this earth’ to the resolve of ‘so let us rejoice in the flowers now.’ The Nahua word often reached for is a kind of clear-eyed sorrow that is also a form of love: to mourn a thing rightly, the songs suggest, is to have valued it, and to value it fully is to feel its coming loss. This is why the poetry never curdles into bitterness. It is the voice of someone who has looked all the way into the fact of death and come back, not with a doctrine that explains it away, but with a heightened tenderness toward everything that is briefly, achingly here. Impermanence is the wound, and it is also the reason for the tenderness.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that the Nezahualcoyotl tradition meditates relentlessly on impermanence - ‘not forever on earth, only a little while here’ - using jade, gold, and quetzal plumes (the most prized and lasting things) as images of what nonetheless perishes. Explain the meditation and why the Nahua thought facing impermanenc…
Leads to Qoheleth (the Preacher of Ecclesiastes).
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