His name was Shams-ud-Din Muhammad. Hafiz means one who has memorised the entire Quran — a title of honour that he earned young. He was a baker's apprentice in Shiraz in the fourteenth century when he saw a woman of extraordinary beauty and fell with a completeness that made everything before it seem like preparation.
Her name was Shakh-e-Nabat — Branch of Sugarcane. She was from a wealthy family and entirely beyond his reach. He was a poor young man who smelled of the bakery.
He had heard that a man who kept vigil for forty nights at the tomb of the Sufi saint Baba Kuhi would be granted his heart's desire. He went to the tomb and began the vigil.
The forty nights of a Sufi vigil are not comfortable. They involve sleeplessness, prayer, fasting, and the systematic encounter with every thought the mind uses to avoid the thing it is asking for. Each night the ordinary defences dissolve a little more. Each night the asking becomes more real.
On the fortieth night, the angel Jibreel appeared. He offered a cup. Hafiz drank.
He woke with the realisation that he had been given something larger than what he had asked for. He had been given the gift of poetry — the specific capacity to express the ineffable, to find the exact word for what cannot be said in ordinary language, to hold the divine and the human simultaneously in a single ghazal without either one diminishing the other.
He looked up from the tomb. Shakh-e-Nabat was still beautiful and still unattainable. The forty nights had not changed this.
What the forty nights had changed was the understanding of what the longing was actually for. Hafiz spent the rest of his long life writing poems in which the beloved is simultaneously the woman of Shiraz and the divine, in which the wine is simultaneously the wine of the tavern and the wine of mystical intoxication, in which the beloved's cruelty and the beloved's grace are two aspects of the same encounter. He understood — from the tomb, from the cup, from the forty nights — that human longing for a human beloved is the precise form that the soul's longing for the divine takes in the world of embodied experience. The woman is real. The longing she produces is real. And the longing, followed honestly to its source, arrives somewhere that the woman, however beautiful, was always pointing toward rather than being. Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, 'you owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that — it lights the whole sky.
Hafiz became the most beloved poet in the Persian language — a position he has held for six hundred and fifty years. In Iran, his Divan is consulted for guidance the way the Bible is consulted in the West — opened at random, the verse read as an oracle for the question being asked. He is the companion of the grieving, the voice of the wedding, the prayer of the dying.
He never had Shakh-e-Nabat. He had the forty nights instead. And the forty nights gave him something that has lit the sky for six centuries.
The thing you cannot have is sometimes the door to the thing you were actually looking for. The not-having, endured honestly through forty nights of vigil, can produce something that the having would never have revealed.