For Solomon, the undertow of this realization came from the fact that it caught him while he was still unhappy. He had been toiling all his life for happiness but had not found it, and now he is beginning to realize that happiness might not be possible at all.
The sun also rises, and the sun goes down.
. . . and Solomon is still unhappy. Not only is the sun not his own personal source of life and identity, but it is also indifferent to his unhappiness and changing moods. This makes the rising and the setting of the sun wearisome to him.
It wasn’t always this way. When we are young, we tend to think the sun rises and sets on us alone. It seems personal. But in fact the sun rises and sets to sustain all life on earth, not only ours. The larger context of this sorrowful reflection, then, is life.
The sun’s indifference to his suffering is painful to Solomon and the shining identity he has been pursuing all his life. Instead of bringing him the dawn of a new day and a new hope, the cycles of the sun begin to mark his discontent with relentless precision.
A sunny day without joy can seem very long indeed. Solomon is looking for the restoration of the joy he once knew. He will find it, but he has a long, long way to go.
The wind returns again according to his circuits.
That is, according to God’s inscrutable plan. Like the sun, the wind is indifferent to us and our little struggles. The plan for the wind is not known to us and has nothing to do with our hopes for happiness. It has a purpose, a function in the natural order of things, but it is not to our purposes.
The reason this thought is oppressive to Solomon is it shows him his nothingness. The winds do not change when Solomon is unhappy; they do not adjust themselves to give him good cheer. The more he understands about the winds, the more his sense of nothingness and dislocation increases.
The wisdom he has obtained about the winds only increases his sorrow. And in fact the sorrows of wisdom will become an important theme as we go along—which is all the more amazing when we consider that Solomon sought identity in wisdom.
The rivers run into the sea, and yet the sea is never full.
This could be Solomon’s motto. Think of the sea as identity. All the rivers of his highly productive life ran into this thirsty sea, but it can never be filled because he could never give himself the one thing he really wanted, the only thing that could make him happy.
And this one thing is life. The desire for an enduring identity is the engine of all our striving, and it is rooted in the desire for life. We don’t want fame for its own sake; we want fame because we want our identity to live. This shows that our highest value is life.
The Bible is unique in linking happiness to the desire for life. Adam and Eve were in paradise as long as they had access to the tree of life; their misery commenced when they were cut off permanently from that tree. That’s a poetic way of saying only life can make us happy.
“The people living in darkness have seen a great light.” But what is this light? It is the resurrected life. Christ is glorified specifically because he obtained life. “In him was life, and this life was the light of the world.” John links the happiness that is found in him directly to life.
Today we have another tree that gives us access to life. But Solomon knew nothing of this tree. He was among the people living in darkness. All his life he tried to obtain happiness by being a superstar. What he was actually trying to obtain, without knowing it, was life.
All the rivers of his ambition flowed into this sea, but it was never full. There was no rest for him, no respite from his labors, because it was not possible to obtain the happiness of life. And now he is beginning to see the futility of all his striving.
We are told there is a river that can satisfy eternal longings, the same river that “makes glad the city of God.” Ezekiel saw it, and it was last seen flowing down the streets of the new Jerusalem, quickening everything it touches, turning brown branches into life.
This river can fill the sea of our longing because it represents the Spirit, who is the Lord and giver of life. But the age of the Spirit had not yet come. All Solomon could see from his disadvantaged viewpoint was the futility and weariness of striving to make himself happy.
Unto the place from whence the rivers come, there they return again.
Solomon’s great soul-weariness is marked by the theme of the perpetual return, which he will bring up repeatedly.
We will ask your permission, dear reader, to use this term without invoking Nietzsche or Buddhism or the “eternal return,” the reincarnation meme, which is a very different thing.
Aristotle tells us all good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an ending. That’s because all good stories are rooted in identity. They have an ending because identity requires closure in order to be happy. The ending sets the story and the identity it provides apart from other stories.
But Solomon has seen something terrifying: the rivers return from whence they came. God’s artfulness in providing for our needs—the cycles through which evaporation of the seas brings us clouds and rain and rivers return to the sea—has become oppressive to him by taking away happy endings.
The rivers are always returning to themselves. And the same is true of the rivers of striving that we pour into the sea of unfulfilled desire. The moment we see them returning, the ending of the story is undone, and it is no longer possible for our endeavors to make us happy.
It now occurs to Solomon that the stories he has been telling himself do not have a happy ending. He thought he was accomplishing something when he was participating in the perpetual return. Nature never grows weary in her cycles, but this is not the case with old men, as he is about to tell us.
All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it.
The rivers are always flowing into the sea. The seasons are always changing. The bird is always feathering its nest or looking for something to eat. The squirrel is always storing up nuts. The tides come and go with the phases of the moon.
When you are young, this perpetual exchange of energy is energizing; but when you are old it may seem exhausting and pointless. Solomon looks upon all the ceaseless labor of nature and is appalled. There is no rest. There is no peace.
The world too is full of labor. The most ambitious among us are constantly toiling. It was not enough for Solomon to build the temple; he had to build a palace too. It was not enough for him to write an exquisitely beautiful love song, the greatest ever penned; he had to write a thousand.
But we are not like nature’s creatures. We grow old and long for rest. We have a home that is not our natural home. We are looking for a place that is not the place where we live and have our being, and this is the source of our discontent.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
We can see or hear beautiful things and enjoy them, but the eye and ear always want more. This is the law of desire. Or as Solomon says in Proverbs, “Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied.”
When we are young, desire seems like a blessing. Let the seeing and the hearing commence! And when we say “young,” we think this feeling probably extends well into middle age, while the life-spirit remains strong and we have not become too reflective.
But a strange thing has happened to Solomon, who is now well beyond middle age. As former pleasures fade, he has seen the dark side of desire. The eye is never satisfied; the ear is never filled. And this poses a problem for someone who longs for contentment.
To be content is to be filled. Desire ceases its restless striving because we already have what we want. But then contentment and the desires of the