Just as the summer shall envy the winter,
Just as the sweet shall envy the bitter,
All suicides must, in the end, reconsider the dead.[2]
Just as the losers shall one day be winners,
The ones who are heavy shall one day be thinner;
The ones who stay fat shall be eaten for dinner instead.
So too the social shall envy the lonesome
As the one who owns nothing must envy who owns some,
And the father of wisdom shall not know what’s grown from his head.[3]
In those days the just shall envy the wicked,
the towering redwood shall envy the thicket,
The passenger pigeons shall turn in their tickets,
And the mightiest city shall fold like a rickety shed.
[1]As none of the primary writings of Herschel have ever been conclusively discovered, one might wonder how the later transcriptions came to occupy the margins of other works. In this case, Herschel appears to have been the favored writer of monks who were supposed to have been transcribing other works, primarily Latin and Greek agricultural texts.[4] More problematic are Herschel’s persistent appearances in typed marginalia.
[2]This verse is sometimes interpreted as an indication that the end-times will be accompanied by the mass-resurrection of suicides. It is correspondingly speculated that the end-times will feature the mass-demise of non-suicides, a claim which is considerably less controversial. The precise timing and degree of overlap between these events is in dispute.
[3]A reference to Zeus, or in some interpretations, Adlai Stevenson.
[4]It may be relied upon that the writing in these texts is not Herschel’s, as throughout his works Herschel displays an almost singular incapacity with even the rudiments of agriculture.
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