Common Sunflower

Common Sunflower (Helianthus annuus, 向日葵).

We spent our Saturday at the Hunan Botanical Garden, which was fairly deserted (it is a work day in compensating for the October national holiday) except for us and a few songbirds. Compared with the splendid floral displays of Spring, most of the individual gardens were docile and dormant; the one exception, by the north entrance, was a large circular display of thousands of sunflowers, all delightfully quixotic: some in decay, some still striving to bloom, some drooping down, some proud and upright, some resting their cumbersome orange heads on the stalks of their lesser peers, and some—a fair many—with mischievous faces carved into their disk florets.

Happy Thanksgiving!

ἡ εὔκαιρος χάρις, λιμῷ καθάπερ τροφὴ ἁρμόττουσα, τὴν τῆς ψυχῆς ἔνδειαν ἰᾶται.

Well-timed gratitude, like wholesome food for hunger, heals what is lacking in the soul.

Heraclitus, Fragment 136. My translation.

Blue Admiral

Blue Admiral (Kaniska canace, 琉璃蛱蝶).

So named on account of the powder blue band on the upperside of the wings. When displaying their undersides they expertly blend into the trees, posing as either a dried leaf or piece of bark.

The Extreme Oddness of Existence

The extreme oddness of existence is what reconciles me to it.

Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia (London: Constable & Company, 1933), p. 153.

Corymica Arnearia

Corymica arnearia (毛穿孔尺蛾).

Though I have never discovered the their larvae in wild, they feed on cinnamomum camphora, which is abundant in local forests. I am sure to spot, however, two or three adult moths every year.

Book Tips from the 1600s

 BOOKS. AUTHORS.
   I. THE giving a bookseller his price for his books, has this advantage; he that will do it, shall be sure to have the refusal of whatsoever comes to his hands, and so by that means get many things, which otherwise he should never have seen. So it is in giving a bawd her price. 

   II. In buying books or other commodities, ’tis not always the best rule to bid but half so much as the seller asks: witness the country fellow, that went to buy two broad shillings; they asked him three shillings, and he bade them eighteen pence*.

   III. They counted the price of the books (Acts 19. 19) and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver; that is so many sextertii, or so many three halfpence of our money, about three hundred pound sterling.

   IV. Popish books teach and inform what we know; we know we know much out of them. The fathers, church story, schoolmen, all may pass for Popish books; and if you take away them, what learning will you leave? Besides who must be judge? The customer or the writer? If he disallows a book, it must not be brought into the kingdom; then Lord have mercy upon all scholars. These Puritan preachers, if they have anything good, they have it out of Popish books, though they will not acknowledge it, for fear of displeasing the people. He is a poor divine that cannot sever the good from the bad.

   V. ’Tis good to have translations, because they serve as a comment, so far as the judgment of the man goes.

   VI. In answering a book, it is best to be short, otherwise he that I write against will suspect I intend to weary him, not to satisfy him. Besides in being long I shall give my adversary a huge advantage; somewhere or other he will pick a hole.

   VII. In quoting of books, quote such authors as are usually read; others you may read for your own satisfaction, but not name them.

   VIII. Quoting of authors is most for matter of fact and then I cite them as I would produce a witness, sometimes for a free expression; and then I give the author his due, and gain myself praise by reading him.

   IX. To quote a modern Dutchman, where I may use a classic author, is as if I were to justify my reputation, and I neglect all persons of note and quality that know me, and bring the testimonial of the scullion in the kitchen.

John Shelden, Table talk: being the discourses of John Selden, Esq. (London: printed for Joseph White, 1789; 1689), pp .21-22.

*emended, from peace.

Nature's Revenge

There is a tractor that is kept by the Xiang river for the purpose of tearing up the reeds and vines that grow to cover the mudflats ever summer. This Autumn, the vines are engaged in a futile effort to subdue the machine.

Rub It On the Floor

  Hugo Dyson, on his visits to Oxford from Reading, became a frequent and most welcome interrupter of Warnie Lewis’s mornings: At about half past eleven when I was at work in the front room in College, in burst Dyson in his most exuberant mood. He began by saying that it was such a cold morning that we would have to adjourn almost immediately to get some brandy. I pointed out to him that if he was prepared to accept whiskey as an alternative, it was available in the room. Having sniffed it he observed “it would be unpardonable rudeness to your brother to leave any of this” and emptied the remains of the decanter into the glass. After talking very loudly and amusingly for some quarter of an hour, he remarked airily “I suppose we can't be heard in the next room?” then having listened for a moment, “Oh, it's all right, it's the pupil talking — your brother won’t want to listen to him anyway”. He next persuaded me to walk round to Blackwell’s with him, and here he was the centre of attraction to a crowd of undergraduates. Walking up to the counter he said: “I want a second hand so-and-so’s Shakespeare; have you got one?” The assistant: “Not a second hand one, sir, I’m afraid.” Dyson (impatiently): “Well, take a copy and rub it on the floor, and sell it to me as shop soiled.

Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), p. 54.

Amphibian Creates Culture

Joseph Scaliger encountered two supernatural beings in the course of his long and well-spent life. He saw one of them, a black man on a horse, as he rode by a marsh with some friends. He only read about the other, a monster named Oannes with the body of a fish and the voice of a man. Yet as so often happened in the Renaissance, the encounter with Art had far more lasting consequences than that with Life. The black man tried to lure Scaliger into the marsh, failed, and disappeared, leaving him confirmed in his contempt for the devil and all his works: “My father didn’t fear the Devil, neither do I. I’m worse than the devil.” Oannes, in the book that Scaliger read, climbed out of the ocean and taught humanity the arts and sciences. Devil Tempts Man, in the Renaissance, was no headline to excite the public; Amphibian Creates Culture was something very far out of the ordinary.

Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (London: Collins & Brown, 1990), p. 99. This passage is repeated, almost verbatim, in Grafton’s ‘Traditions of Invention and Inventions of Tradition in Renaissance Italy: Annius of Viterbo’, in Defenders of the Text (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 76-103 (p. 76) and ‘Traditions of Invention and Inventions of Tradition in Renaissance Italy: The Strange Case of Annius of Viterbo’ in The Transmission of Cultures in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990, pp.8-38 (p. 8).

Anterhynchium Flavomarginatum

Anterhynchium flavomarginatum (黄缘蜾蠃).

It is the time of year when there are many wasps and hornets about. This potter wasp, with its blue wings is the most attractive one I have seen so far.

Ocellated Shield Bug Nymph

Ocellated Shield Bug (Cantao ocellatus, 角盾蝽). Nymph.

A nice Autumn-orange bug. A dozen or so of these were crawling along the leaves and stems of various plants in Taohualing Park on September 29: all nymphs, I have not yet encountered an adult.

The Traditional Novel

 The novel, the traditional novel, she goes on to say, is an attempt to understand human fate one case at a time, to understand how it comes about that some fellow being, having started at point A and having undergone experiences B and C and D, ends up at point Z. Like history, the novel is thus an exercise in making the past coherent. Like history, it explores the respective contributions of character and circumstance to forming the present. By doing so the novel suggests how we may explore the power of the present to produce the future. That is why we have this thing, this institution, this medium called the novel.

J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003), p. 38-39.

Mysterious Cocoon

There are plenty of curious cocoons in Autumn. In Wangling park there were several of these on the vines: I wonder what they might be?

Creative Genius

[...[  creative literary genius does not principally show itself in discovering new ideas; that is rather the business of the philosopher: the grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not analysis and discovery; its gifts lie in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations, —making beautiful works with them, in short.

Matthew Arnold, 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time', in Essays by Matthew Arnold including Essays in Criticism, 1865 On Translating Homer (With F.W. Newman’s Reply) and Five Other Essays now for the first time collected (London: Oxford University Press, 1914): pp. 9-36 (p. 12).