The Vapor and the Eternity Inside It

Ecclesiastes opens with a verdict that sounds like surrender. “Futility of futilities,” says the Teacher; “everything is futile.” Then comes the question the whole book turns on: “What does a man gain from all his labor, at which he toils under the sun?”

The Teacher is traditionally read as Solomon, the king who had the rare freedom to test every answer the world offers. He chased pleasure, built houses, planted vineyards, gathered silver and gold and singers, grew wiser than anyone before him – and watched it all run through his fingers. “Generations come and generations go,” he writes, “but the earth remains forever.” The sun rises and sets and hurries back to rise again. The rivers run to the sea and the sea is never full. “What has been will be again… there is nothing new under the sun.”

This is not the complaint of a man who has too little. It is the confession of a man who has had everything and found that everything, gripped tightly, evaporates. He calls it a chasing after wind: you can feel it move past you, but you close your hand and there is nothing there.

A retired executive I knew kept a single sheet of paper in his desk drawer. On it he had written, years before, the things he was sure would make a life whole: a certain title, a certain house, a certain number in the account, the respect of people he admired. He hit every one of them. He showed me the list the way you show someone a scar.

What unsettled him was not failure. It was that he had succeeded completely and still woke at four in the morning with the same hollow under his ribs he had felt at twenty-five. The list had promised an arrival. He had arrived. And the place was empty.

He was not a bitter man, and he did not regret the work. He simply could not understand why getting everything had changed so little on the inside. He had spent his life filling a hand that would not stay full. He had been, without the word for it, chasing the wind.

Traditionally identified with Solomon, the Teacher (qohelet, ‘the one who assembles’) had the wealth, wisdom, and freedom to run the experiment most people only dream of: to try every answer the world offers and report back on what satisfies. His verdict, repeated thirty-eight times, was hevel – vapor, futility, a chasing after wind. But he did not end in despair. Having proven that nothing under the sun fills the heart, he points his readers above the sun: ‘Remember your Creator’ (12:1); ‘Fear God and keep His commandments’ (12:13).