What Do You Feel When You Come Upon a Bridal Car... or a Funeral?

Weddings and funerals — that is life!...

The truths of the universe pass before us, swift as a merry tune or slow as a melody weighted with long silence...

Do those tunes and melodies, do you think, invade every heart — at one moment breathing gladness into it, at another wringing from it a sigh??

Sheikh Munir Takieddine, Director General of the Ministry of Defense, says in his spontaneous way, describing his feeling when he comes upon a bridal car or a funeral:
— I grieve in the first case because I am not the groom, and I rejoice in the second because I am not the dead man!!

Hiyam Rabiz, student at Beirut College for Women.
Q — What do you feel when you come upon a bridal car or a funeral?
A — I grieve when I see a bride, and I pity her lot, because a girl's life, in my view, is freer and less toilsome than a wife's.
As for when I see a funeral, I try as far as I can to shield my eyes, so as not to remember that every living thing has an end...

Aida Faghali, secretary at the Tekton Company.
— It is absurd for the bride to pass through the street amid uproar and commotion and the blaring of car horns. This is proof of a deficiency in the refinement of our tastes, for beauty lies not in din and buffoonery but in calm and composure.
As for our funerals, they always remind me of the difference between the classes of society, which shows itself even in death — before which all are supposed to be equal... Yet I have never felt sorrow except before the poor man's procession.

Fuad Rifqa, M.A. at the American University.
1 — I say: here is a woman who has surrendered her freedom for the sake of an unguaranteed happiness.
2 — A man clapping before he dies. The great farce is over!

Sami Makarem, M.A. at the American University.
1 — God! When, I wonder, will my turn come!
2 — God! When will my grandfather's turn come! (His grandfather is rich!)

Boulos Mubarak, employee at the American University, unmarried.

1 — I feel the progress of the social body, for marriage is the pillar of the family, and the family is the pillar of society.

2 — The sight of a funeral alerts us that man's life is limited, and that he must therefore make it a fruitful life: a life of thought and creation.

— I, in my present circumstances (she has broken off her engagement yet again), consider that the girl sitting in the back seat of that car is a silly fool.

As for the sight of a funeral, it never saddens me at all, for this is the game of the universe — laisser passer: one human being dies so that another may be created.

Samia Saab, B.A. in literature (and in dancing too).

— I cannot express what I feel at such a moment, for it is an experience that passes over us and snatches our feeling away; when it goes, the feeling vanishes. Like a shooting star that gleams for a second and then disappears.

Dr. Anis Frayha, professor of Semitic languages at the American University.

— As for me, my heart rejoices when I see two people marrying, for I am one of the advocates of marriage. A bridal car is one of the most charming and beautiful pictures of life; it covers over many an ugly scene in this world — poverty, sickness, and ignorance. Marriage is the most beautiful thing in life; it is the picture of goodness and beauty together.

— A funeral? There is no power and no strength save in God... I always raise my hat and stand in respect. The sight of a funeral creates in me a certain reflection and reverence, and a feeling of the triviality of life and its brevity.

Razzouk Razzouk: an Iraqi poet.

If the singing procession passes me by, I look at once at the face of the bride —

and if her looks have pleased me, I wish that I had been the groom!

I remember the saying of al-Ma'arri:
Life is all weariness; so I marvel
at none but him who desires more of it.

Loris George Sarkis.

— It is as if weddings and funerals were nothing but passing incidents that befall man, and he furnishes them with a smile that soon hardens, or a tear that soon dries! And what single second of man's life on earth does not hold within its folds weddings beyond counting and funerals beyond number? I have never come upon a wedding or witnessed a funeral without feeling that the wedding and the funeral are two links no different from the other links of which human life is composed... He who sees clearly that gray hair is, to the night, the morning, and that in December's tears lie the songs of May, can feel with me, when he witnesses a wedding or a funeral, that in the groom's garments are his shrouds, and that in the dead man's remains is a crown for a new wedding...