An Even More Sinister Analgesic

Zadie Smith White Teeth (London: Hamish Hamilton,  2000), p. 167.

If religion is the opium of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.

The Doctor's Art

non est in medico semper relevetur ut aeger:
   interdum docta plus valet arte malum.

A doctor cannot always cure the ill:
   sickness, at times, is beyond all proven skill.

Ovid, Ex Ponto, I.iii.17-18. My translation.

Japanese Giant Gecko

Japanese Giant Gecko (Gekko japonicus, 多疣壁虎).

Although they are rare to see during the day on Yuelu Mountain, they are very active at night. In any of the open buildings scattered around the mountain, they can reliably be found after sunset, lying in wait for insects on the roofs and walls.

Courage and Artlessness

Claire Harman, Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography (London: Penguin Books, 2015; 1989), p. 185:

The naval war of the winter of 1939 may not have seemed too threatening to the population of West Dorset, but the events of early 1940 did. Hitler overran Denmark and Norway in April with alarming ease, and the Royal Navy had difficulty holding the position won at Narvik. By the summer, the governments of Poland and Belgium, the King and Queen of Norway and the Queen of the Netherlands were all in exile in London; the British Expeditionary Force, once so sure of hanging out its washing on the Siegfried Line, had been caught in a pincer movement, and was trapped at Dunkirk. France was within weeks of capitulation to Germany. Early measures taken at home to provide some protection for civilians now lost their air of pointless routine and were undertaken in earnest, and in the wake of earnestness came a deal of inefficiency. Sylvia wrote wearily of an ARP air-raid rehearsal in Maiden Newton: ‘It is like a knock-about farce film done in slow motion, and at intervals some member of the local gentry pipes up to say, “Well, let’s hope it will never be needed”, or “We can’t really get on with it without Mr Thompson”, or “Has it started yet, do you know?” The most melancholy thought is, that if there is a real raid they will all dauntlessly turn up to mismanage it, for their courage is as unquestionable as their artlessness.’

Gray-capped Pygmy Woodpecker

Gray-capped Pygmy Woodpecker (Yungipicus canicapillus, 星头啄木鸟).

A small woodpecker, spotted in Xuanwu Lake Park in Nanjing during a morning walk (I was there for a conference).

Greek Poetry and Geography

Robin Lane Fox, Homer and His Iliad (London: Penguin Books, 2023), p. 54:

Throughout antiquity, Greek poetry and cult show a strong connection to particular sites and landscapes in the real world. The Iliad already exemplifies it. Homer had visited windy Troy on a clear day when distant Samothrace was visible. He had identified vantage points for the gods and visited them too on either side of the bay on whose shore he placed the Greek ships. I like to think he had walked south, like Chryses, beside the shore of the booming sea and come to the promontory called Chryse and to the sanctuary a little way inland where, for him, Chryses was the priest of Apollo. From there, I take him in my mind’s eye on an uphill walk for several hours on a crisp day in early spring, up through the crocuses which were carpeting the slopes with gold below Gargaron and on to the foot of its grey peak, where he stopped, checked the view back to Troy and made an offering to Zeus.

Chinese Thistle

Chinese Thistle (Cirsium chinense, 崂山蓟).

Found growing by a trail in Shibadong. The deeply lobed leaves are strikingly different than the thistles one more often comes across.

Gentlemen

Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (Boston: Back Bay Books 1999; 1928), p. 54.

For generations the British bourgeoisie have spoken of themselves as gentlemen, and by that they have meant, among other things, a self-respecting scorn of irregular perquisites. It is the quality that distinguishes the gentleman from both the artist and the aristocrat.

Swan Goose

Swan Goose (Anser cygnoides, 鸿雁).

A migratory goose that winters in southern China, though truly wild ones are rare. More common are domesticated geese and there feral (having escaped from farms) cousins.

Civilization is Communication

 Civilization is communication. When that which should be expressed and transmitted is lost, civilization comes to an end. Click…OFF.

Haruku Murakami, Wind/Pinball: two novels, trans. by Ted Goossen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015; 1979-1980), p. 19.

Molipteryx Lunata

Molipteryx lunata (月肩莫缘蝽).

A squash bug with a crescent-moon shape, they are found throughout southern China. This one was on the exterior wall of a building in Shibadong.

Chinese Books

Duarte de Sande, Diálogo sobre a missão dos embaixadores japoneses à Cúria Romana, ed. by Américo da Costa Ramalho & Sebastião Tavares de Pinho, 2 vols (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2009; 1590) , II, pp. 719-21:

Veniamus nunc ad eam artem quam Sinae summopere profitentur, eamque merito litteraturam possumus appellare. Quamuis enim uulgata fama sit, a Sinis multas ingenuas artes coli, praesertimque utramque philosophiam, quae de rerum natura et moribus agit, et apud eos esse Academias, ubi huiusmodi artes traduntur haec tamen opinio magna ex parte popularis potius, quam uera censenda est.
   Dicam tamen quid huic opinioni occasionem dederit. In primis ergo Sinae litterariam artem praecipue profitentur, eamque diligentissime ediscunt, longum tempus totamque fere aetatem ea in re consumentes. Eam ob causam in omnibus urbibus et oppidis, immo et in exiguis pagis sunt magistri, mercede conducti, qui pueros litteras docent. Cumque illae iuxta nostrum etiam communiorem morem sint infinitae, ab ineunte aetate, tenerisque unguiculis pueri libros in manus sumunt, quos tantum illi deponunt qui parum habiles ad hoc munus iudicantur, et ad mercaturam, uel artes quae manibus exercentur, animum applicant. Reliqui uero tanto studio ad litteras incumbunt, ut mirabiliter in praecipuis libris sint uersati, et in quauis pagina quot sint litterae, et in quo situ rogati, facile respondeant.

Let us now to that art in which the Chinese cultivate the most, and which we may rightly call literature. For although it is popularly known that the Chinese cultivate many ingenuous arts, and especially the two branches of philosophy, which deal with the nature of things and manners, and that there are academies among them, where such arts are taught, yet this opinion is by and large more commonplace than it is true.
   However, I will comment on, what gave rise to this opinion. Firstly, therefore, the Chinese especially profess the art of letters and learn it with the greatest diligence, spending a long time and almost and almost their entire lives in study. For this reason, in all cities and towns, even in small villages, there are hired teachers who teach characters to children. And since their characters are infinite compared to our alphabet, from the earliest age children carry books in their hands, and only those who are considered inept put them down and apply their minds to trade or the manual arts. As for the rest, they devote themselves so ardently to letters that they become marvellously versed in the canonical books, and when asked how many letters there are and where on each page, they easily answer.

My translation.

Oedaleus Manjius

Oedaleus manjius (红胫小车蝗).

Spotted by the forest in Shibadong: the first time and only time I have encountered this bandwing grasshopper.

Sparrow False Pimpernel

Sparrow False Pimpernel (Bonnaya antipoda, 泥花草).

A perennial plant distributed from subtropical Asia to Australia, where it blooms in April. Here in the Xiang mudflats, is a November Autumn flower.

The Snail

 'The Snail'

See the sick and wounded snail,
   Sick in mind and body both,
   Travelling through the undergrowth
Or asparagus and kale,
Exiled from the herd (or horde)
Where he once was overlord.

See him as his eyeballs glaze;
   Nasty sorts of flies and things,
   Such as every poet brings
Into poems nowadays,
Buzz about the eyes and tail
Of this old unhappy snail.

Ants arise to greet the dawn,
   Beetles burnish up their mail,
   But the old unhappy snail
Creeps towards the croquet lawn,
Where the loathly blackbird jumps,
Looking out for slithery lumps.

He recalls the moment when
   Long ago, a thing uncouth,
   He arrived without a tooth,
Youngest of a batch of ten.
(Snails recall their infancy
For more brightly than do we.)

How he gambolled round about,
   Always at his mother’s side
   Filled with lustihood and pride,
Feeding upon Brussels-spout,
Turnip-tops and cauliflower.
(Pity him in his lone-hour!)

Oft in those remembered morns
   With his tiny friends at play
   He would butt, and so would they,
Making trial of his horns,
Butt until he felt unwell
And retired to his shell.

Till at last his hour occurred;
   Fiercely then, and roaring loud,
   He attacked the leader proud,
Chieftain of the hornéd herd,
Whilst the lady snails looked on,
Smiling at their paragon.

Foaming at the lips with slime,
   Each the hated foe assails
   (Battles between rival snails
Occupy no end of time);
Butting hard but butting slow,
These went on two weeks or so.

See him victor at the last;
   See the victim creep away,
   Tameless even in decay,
From the treacherous herd outcast,
Whilst the hero of our plot
Stands the head-snail of the lot.

Stands resplendent in his pride
   Waving to and fro his horns;
   Not a beetle but he scorns,
Not an earthworm far and wide
But he tosses from his path,
Bellowing in berserk wrath.

How he altered! Now he’s been
   Broken like the one before;
   All his face is smeared with gore;
Showing undisguised chagrin
He is crawling, as I said,
Through the vegetable bed.

Soon to meet the blackbird grim
   Perching on the fateful tree,
   While the last snail (Number Three),
Having now defeated him,
Lords it, till in turn he fails,  
And a fourth——
                       Oh! —— these snails!

Evoe [E.V. Knox], Parodies Regained (London: Methuen , 1921), pp.  95-98.

This edition contains some fun illustrations by George Morrow. Originally published for Punch magazine.

Scotland

 “Scotland,” said Cunningham, “is too cold, a country for locusts, and too poor a country for thieves.”

Sir Walter Scott, Quentin Durward (London: Thomas Nelson and sons, n.d.; 1823, p. 91.

Fragrant Flatsedge

Fragrant Flatsedge (Cyperus odoratus, 断节莎).

Growing in the mudflats of the Xiang river. This plant has a global distribution, though future research might reveal that there is more than species, collected together under this classification.

Benefits Falling to the Lot of the Emigrant Scholar

It is one of the benefits falling to the lot of the emigrant scholar that, however much his outward activity may be curtailed in the new country in comparison with his former situation, his inner activity is bound to be immensely enhanced and intensified: instead of writing as he pleases,  after the usual fashion of the German scholar in particular (who is so well satisfied to live in the paradise of his ideas, whether this be accessible to his fellow men or not), he must, while trying to preserve his own idea of scholarship, continually count with his new audience, bearing in mind not only the conventional requirements but also those innermost strivings of the nation (inasmuch as it is given him to feel them) which, opposed to his nature as they may have seemed to him in the beginning, tend imperceptibly to become a second nature in him-indeed, to make shine by contrast his first nature in the clearest light. And, by so doing, he comes to feel enriched and to find that he has attained peace and happiness.

Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948), p. v.

Phtheirospermum Japonicum

Phtheirospermum japonicum (松蒿).

Another flower from Shibadong. The genus phtheirospermum is monotypic, and japonicum is misleading as it grows throughout the 'far east'.

Emancipating Translation

On Sir John Denham (1615-1669):

He appears to have been one of the first that understood the necessity of emancipating translation from the drudgery of counting lines, and interpreting single words. How much this servile practice obscured the clearest, and deformed the most beautiful parts of the ancient authors, may be discovered by a perusal of our earlier versions; some of them are the works of men well qualified, not only by critical knowledge, but by poetical genius, who yet, by a mistaken ambition of exactness, degraded, at once, their originals and themselves.

Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1959; 1779–81), I, p. 59.

Hubei Anemone

Hubei Anemone (Eriocapitella hupehensis, 打破碗花花).

Widely cultivated, but in some places still wild. Early November in Shibadong, these fragile flowers were abundant throughout the forests, clinging to rocky outcrops or wherever else they could find a little sun.

Uphill

Christina Rossetti
‘Uphill’

  Does the road wind uphill all the way?
   Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
   From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?
  A roof for when the slow, dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
  You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
  Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
  They will not keep you waiting at that door.
 
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
  Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
  Yea, beds for all who come.

Clematis Lasiandra

Clematis lasiandra (毛蕊铁线莲).

A very striking wild clematis, growing wild in Shibadong in early November. I only found it growing in one spot but there, there were dozens of small flowers.

White Mugwort

White Mugwort (Artemisia lactiflora, 白苞蒿).

Fairly uncommon on Yuelu Mountain (but abundant in other regions), one solitary plant was in bloom near a local stream.

A Diet of Coffee and Cigarettes

Claire Harman, Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography (London: Penguin Books, 2015; 1989), p. 55.

It also seemed to Bea that Sylvia lived off cups of black coffee and cigarettes, as indeed she did, bar a few winkles and the odd scrambled egg.

Strange Ugly Caterpillar

An usual fleshy-coloured larva: the species eludes me now but hopefully one day I will be able to identity this interesting insect.

Idleness

Bertrand Russell, ‘In Praise of Idleness’ In In Praise of Idleness: and Other Essays (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1935),  pp. 9-29 (p. 14):

Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technic has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

Aster Ageratoides

Aster ageratoides (三脉紫菀).

I took this picture in Shibadong, but this aster is very in the mountains during Autumn, both along the roads and travels and deeper with the forests.

Presbyopia and the Invention of Modern Handwriting

B.L. Ullman, Origin and Development of Humanistic Script (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1960), pp. 14-15:

Why so much attention to the complaints of two aging men of the fourteenth century? Because they explain what happened. It may at first sight seem strange that it was the clear script of the fourteenth-century humanists like Petrarch and Coluccio rather than the crabbed Gothic of France, Germany, and England that was the first to be reformed. It is not always the institution or individual most in need of reforming that actually gets reformed first. At any rate, it would seem that the difficulties of Coluccio in particular had something to do with the reform, as we shall see. Eyeglasses had been invented, it is true, but they were neither widely used nor very satisfactory. So we may say that presbyopia started the reform of handwriting. Thanks to the improvement of eyeglasses in modern times, we determine or need for them and their strength by the ability to read the telephone book. In 1400 it was easier to change handwriting than to change glasses.

Blushing Rosette

Blushing Rosette (Abortiporus biennis, 二年残孔菌).

This colourful fungus was hiding by a small stream on Yuelu Mountain. It has otherwise been a very dry season, and lacking in fungi.

What Ruskin Said

How true it was what Ruskin said, that evil communications corrupt good manners. But did Ruskin say it? On second thoughts she was not sure, but it was just the sort of thing he would have said if he had said it, and in any case it was true.

Elizabeth Arnim, The Enchanted April (London: Penguin Books, 2012; 1922), p. 162.

Chusan Palm

Chusan Palm (Trachycarpus fortunei, 棕榈).

A fan palm that has been cultivated for thousands of years. This one is growing high up on Yuelu Mountain, along with many other trees, some native, others also introduced over the course of human history.

An Egg-Shaped Poem

Pierio Valeriano (1477-1558)

      Danieli Barbaro.P.V. Ouum Dactylicum.
                           θεοκρατικῶς

                                  Sacrā
                                 Barbari
                              Thespiades
                           Cingite frontem
                          Floribus  omnibus
                        OEbaliis,      Paphiis,
                       Laurigerisque  coronis.
                   Nam ferit hic bene Barbyton
                  Suauisonis      modulaminibus:
                Egregius adeò  ,      vt data vobis
               Huic  rear  aurea plectra  sororibus:
                Aoniumve  dedit   puero   melos
                Et citharā bonus addit Apollo,
                  Indole   captus  ,  & ingenio,
                   Hunc hederis igitur sacris
                      Cingite protinus almæ
                           Pierides nouum
                                  Poëtam.

Pierio Valeriano, Hieroglyphica; [opuscula uaria] (Cologne: apud Ioannem Wilhemum Friessem, 1685), p. 123. My translation:

'To Daniel Barbaro, VenetianPatriarch: A Dactylic Egg (In a divine manner)'.

Thespiades, surround the barbarian’s sacred brow with all the flowers of Oebalia, Paphos and laurel-bearing crowns. For he strikes the barbiton well with sweet-sounding melodies. So eloquent, that I think golden picks were given to you by the sister Muses: Or good Apollo imparts Aeonian melodies and a lyre. Captive to genius and wit, surround this new poet, o nourishing Pierdes, with sacred ivy.

Ourapteryx Yerburii

Ourapteryx yerburii (淡黄双斑尾尺蛾).

A medium-sized geometer moth. There were many of them out during our nocturnal searches on Hengshan last October 28th.

Unpunctuality

Leszek Kolakowski, 'In Praise of Unpunctuality' in Is God Happy?: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 2013), pp. 219-223 (p .219):

Unpunctuality is the ingrained habit of regularly failing to fulfil people’s expectations regarding the specific time at which certain of our actions will take place, these expectations being the result of assurances on our part, tacit or explicit, regarding that specific time.

Touch-me-not Balsam

Touch-me-not Balsam (Impatiens noli-tangere, 水金凤).

A flower that can be found throughout the Northern hemisphere, its flowers are very common on Hengshan in late October. The fruit of this balsam explore when ripe, thereby scattering seeds over a distance.

Biography

Biography is the White Man's Graveyard for a working writer. The work expands to fill as much time and energy as one will give it.

Michael Swanwick, Hope-in-the-mist: the Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees (Upper Montclair, NJ: Temporary Culture, 2009), p. 52.

Geisha Distinctissima

Geisha distinctissima (碧蛾蜡蝉).

Another nocturnal insect from Hengshan. This one a handsome flatid planthopper, resting on the lichen-covered bark of a tree.

Grammatical Training

Ohne sichere grammatische Schulung und weitausgreifende Lektüre ist nichts zu erreichen . Germanistik , Romanistik , Anglistik entbehren alter Tradition . Sie fallen darum den Moden und Irrungen des « Zeitgeistes » leicht zum Opfer.

Without solid grammatical training and extensive reading, nothing can be achieved. German studies, Romance studies, English studies lack ancient tradition. They therefore easily fall victim to the fashions and aberrations of the ’spirit of the times'.

E.R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur Und Lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: A. Francke AG, 1948), p. 386. My translation.

Auzata Semipavonaria

Auzata semipavonaria (半豆斑钩蛾).

A rare moth, discovered during a night-time search for nocturnal insects at Hengshan. We mostly encountered common species, so this was a highlight of the evening.

The Norman Conquest

Kyril Bonfiglioli, The Mortdecai Trilogy (London: Black Spring Press, 1979), p. 79:

‘England isn’t like the Continent, you see, nor even like Scotland in this respect. The seize quartiers “noble in all his branches” thing is something we don’t like to talk about and there aren’t half a dozen families with straight descent from a knight of the Conquest, I should think – and they aren’t titled. Anyway,’ I rambled on, ‘no one in his senses would want to be descended from one of that lot: the Conquest was something between a joint-stock company and a Yukon gold-rush; William the Conk himself was a sort of primitive Cecil Roberts and his followers were bums, chancers, queers and comic singers.’

Metagentiana Rhodantha

Metagentiana rhodantha (红花龙胆).

Spotted by the roadside in Shibadong Village, west Hunan on November 3. It was clearly some species of gentian though it took me some research to narrow it down to the species.

Churchill's Wiriting Process

Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 429:

The charge in its most literal sense is irrefutable. From at least this stage onwards Churchill never wrote out a book de novo. He depended on having his factual material not merely checked after he had written it, but as carefully prepared for him in advance as was the laying out of the instruments for a famous surgeon. When he transformed the basic material, by adding insights, comparisons, metaphors and flights of oratorical fancy, he mostly did so by dictation, normally the enemy of succinctness, and not by pen. Sometimes, as with many articles and with My Early Life, he would dictate the whole draft out of his head, and then very carefully correct it. He also acquired the odd habit of being unable to envisage the shape of a book without having it set up in printed proof at an early stage, and then hacking it about in a way that a modern publisher would regard as intolerably inflating his printing budget. Thus when, in February 1930, he was proposing to add about 40,000 new words to the 50,000 or more of My Early Life which he had already written (the number of literary balls he had in the air at that stage is staggering), he insisted that, at his own expense if necessary, the already written text must be set up in print – ‘until I see the existing material in type I cannot make progress’.13 Associated with this was his increasing desire to work standing up, for which purpose he acquired a sloping desk of appropriate height at the side of his Chartwell study. He needed the feel and look of printed proofs for his literary teeth, but he rarely worked at them seated at a writing table. It was nearly all done either upright or in bed.

Mountain Retreat

ἐντὶ δάφναι τηνεί, ἐντὶ ῥαδιναὶ κυπάρισσοι,
ἔστι μέλας κισσός, ἔστ᾽ ἄμπελος ἁ γλυκύκαρπος,
ἔστι ψυχρὸν ὕδωρ, τό μοι ἁ πολυδένδρεος Αἴτνα
λευκᾶς ἐκ χιόνος ποτὸν ἀμβρόσιον προΐητι.
τίς κα τῶνδε θάλασσαν ἔχειν καὶ κύμαθ᾽ ἕλοιτο;

There are laurel trees, and slender cypresses,
there is dark ivy, and the sweet-fruited vine,
there is cool water, which tree-abounding Aetna
sends forth as an ambrosial draught from her snowy heights.
Who would choose the sea and its waves over these?

Theocritus, Idyl. XI.45-49. My translation.

Zhurong Peak

Zhurong Peak, the highest point on Hengshan, one of the Five Great Mountains of China. Many pilgrims carry incense to be burned in the adjacent fire god temple. We walked up in the Autumn sun, and travelled down enveloped in heavy mists.

Reading, Rambling and Education

    In intellectual matters things were no better with me. I have before me a small paper book containing a ‘Diary’ for parts of the years 1830, 1831, 1832. Its childishness is astonishing. I had read much more than most boys of my age, but I did not seem to understand anything. This was the want of companionship; I had no one except the sons of the village cottagers to play with. We had a man-servant indoors, and a farming- man out of doors; I was much with them, and learnt much from them; but there was nothing to replace the collision of wit with wit, which takes place between boys. One of these men was a dalesman, native of Hawes, and from him I had stories of the old wild life of the dales, mixed largely with the supernatural, which germinated afterwards into a strong turn for county history, and walks of exploration. I read enormously. Constable’s Miscellany, Murray’s Family Library, the publications of the Useful Knowledge Society, were coming out at that time; we took them all, and I read them. I read ten times as much as I remembered; what is more odd, I read far more than I ever took in the sense of as I read it. I think the mechanical act of perusal must have given me a sort of pleasure. Books, as books, irrespective of their contents, were my delight. The arrival of a new book in the house was the event of the week. I took in the Magazine of Natural History; the anticipation of the first of the month, and the reception of the parcel from the Richmond bookseller, were an excitement that I can remember to this day. I walked up and down in the lane waiting for the butcher's cart, which acted as carrier for the village, to come, snatched up Bell’s parcel, and rushed in with it. I was already marked out for the life of a student, yet little that was in the books I read seemed to find its way into my mind. There was no mind there! My outdoor life, long solitary days’ fishing, and long rides across country – in 1831 I had a pony and went hunting – rambles over the moor, were doing more for my education than my incessant reading.

Mark Pattison, Memoirs of an Oxford Don (London: Cassell, 1988; 1885), pp. 32-33.

Saffron Milkcap

Saffron Milkcap (Lactarius deliciosus, 松乳菇).

I was at a conference at Shibadong Village in West Hunan, which has been vaunted as exemplary model in China's poverty reduction campaign over the past ten years. I had a chance to explore a little, and met an elderly Miao man on the roadside who was selling these mushrooms that he had picked on the mountain earlier that morning. They are very popular in rural Hunan, and usually cooked with pork.

All of Greece

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2006; 1958), p. 10:

All of Greece is absorbing and rewarding. There is hardly a rock or a stream without a battle or a myth, a miracle or a peasant anecdote or a superstition; and talk and incident, nearly all of it odd or memorable, thicken round the traveller’s path at every step.

A Magpie Moth From Hengshan

Magpie Moth (Complex Abraxas Amicula-illuminata, 金星尺蛾属).

Still one of the most fascinating local moths. This individual was a lighter grey and a different pattern than I have seen before.

Science Fiction Writers

  Not for the first time in my writing career, however, I found myself losing interest in something just as I gained access to its inner circle. Fortunately, the London science-fiction community had no shortage of burned-out cases and perennially promising talents, and since I was as keen a collector of science-fiction first editions as ever, the writers and fans accepted me amiably enough, though my tendency, noted by Kingsley Amis, to linger all night over half of a lager meant I was always looked on a little askance.
   This cut both ways, since science-fiction and fantasy writers don’t make the best company. Those who aren’t scholarly and dull are usually in some way psychologically maimed. ‘All the great fantasies, I suppose, have been written by emotionally crippled men,’ wrote Damon Knight, the doyen of science-fiction critics. ‘[Robert E.] Howard [author of the stories about Conan the Cimmerian] was a recluse and a man so morbidly attached to his mother that when she died he committed suicide. [H.P.] Lovecraft had enough phobias and eccentricities for nine: [A.B.] Merritt was chinless, bald and shaped like a shmoo. The trouble with Conan is that the human race never produced and never could produce such a man, and sane writers know it; therefore the sick writers have a monopoly of him.’
   None of the writers I met qualified for the description ‘sick’, but, for many, a career on the margins of literature had taken its toll. In his long career, Harry Harrison, for instance, had dabbled in just about every form of fiction from comic-book dialogue balloons to a ‘Saint’ novel ghosted for Leslie Charteris. The result was evident in his books. His novel The Stainless Steel Rat and its sequels squirmed with his cynicism, as did his Deathworld trilogy. ‘Slippery’ Jim diGriz of The Stainless Steel Rat is a cosmic con man whose larcenous skills are co-oped to help govern the galaxy, while, in the Deathworld books, colonists land on a planet where every plant and animal is bent on their destruction. Only in the third book do they discover that both flora and fauna can sense the emotions of the invaders; registering Man’s innate hostility, they return it with interest. The message of both series is clear: everyone in authority is a crook, and everything is out to get you.

John Baxter, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2005), pp. 210-211.

Ginkgo

Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba, 银杏).

I love ginko, a unique and ancient tree. They have been around for hundreds of millions of years and I hope they are around for hundreds of millions more.

Society Inebriated by Technology

   For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life. Philosophy itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality – modern American philosophy was in fact one of the causes of that weakness – and generally it, too, prefers to tinker and to tweak.
   
   The machines to which we have become enslaved, all of them quite astonishing, represent the greatest assault on human attention ever devised: they are engines of mental and spiritual dispersal, which make us wider only by making us less deep. There are thinkers, reputable ones if you can believe it, who proclaim that the exponential growth in computational ability will soon take us beyond the finitude of our bodies and our minds so that, as one of them puts it, there will no longer be any difference between human and machine. La Mettrie lives in Silicon Valley. This, of course, is not an apotheosis of the human but an abolition of the human; but Google is very excited by it.

Leon Wieseltier, ‘ “Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture” A Defense of the Humanities’, The Commencement Ceremony of Brandeis University, 19 May 2013

Chinese Rice Grasshopper

Chinese Rice Grasshopper (Oxya chinensis, 中华稻蝗).

It is difficult to resist a short-horned grasshopper, unless they are gathered in one's crops or gardens. This one was perched on a rock as the mists began to rapidly envelop Hengshan.

Horace's Sabine Farm

Of course we have only the outline of a house. The walls and the roof have gone long ago, except for the lower courses which indicate the size and the style of the place; the fragmentary works of art and small utensils found during the dig are in a museum near by. Yet the floor-plan is clear, and some of the mosaic floors are still in place. As Horace himself says, it is a modest enough house. But anyone who has had the pleasure of visiting it will never again call it a farm. It was a charming country house, inhabited by a man who had good taste and loved comfort and seclusion.

Gilbert Highet, Poets in a Landscape (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2010; 1957), pp. 144-45.

Mantid Ootheca

One last mantid find from our Hengshan trip: an ootheca, which had already hatched. What species it belongs to, I am somewhat uncertain. Perhaps H. chinensis or T. formosana?

The Latin for Cold

The Latin for Cold.

A school-master asked one of his scholars in the
winter time, what was the Latin for cold. " Oh!
sir," answered the lad, " I forget at this moment,
although I have it at my fingers' ends."

J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps & A.J. Storey, Cambridge Jokes: From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; 1842), p .8.

Chinese Mantis

Chinese Mantis (Tenodera sinensis, 中华大刀螳).

One pleasure of visiting Hengshan mountain is the diversity and abundance of mantids. This large mantis was happily minding her own business and enjoying the windy weather.

A Poem to Help One Remember the Muses

Guarino Veronese (1374-1460)
Carmina de Musis

Esse Iovis natas cecinere poemata Musas,
Nanque hominum rebus dextras deus obtulit artes.
Instruit historiis mortales vivere Clio.
Tempora plantandi docuit legesque Thalia.
Euterpe monstrat quas fundat tibia voces.
Melpomene exponit varios distinguere cantus.
Terpsichore oblectat dehinc lumina nostra choreis.
Conubiis Erato gratos moderatur amores.
Ostendit sulcos segetesque Polymnia vitae.
Urania polos docet et portenta polorum.
Calliope vates ornat vocesque serenat.

The poems they sang were Muses, Jupiter’s daughters,
For the god offered skillful arts for the affairs of men.
Clio teaches mortals to live on in histories.
Thalia taught the seasons and rules for planting.
Euterpe teaches the flute which notes to utter.
Melpomene explains how to distinguish different songs.
Thereupon, Terpsichore adds cheer to our lives with dances.
Erato navigates pleasing loves into marriages.
Polymnia reveals the furrows and fields of life.
Urania shows the heavens and celestial omens.
Calliope honours poets and brightens their voices.

Guarino Veronese, Guarini Veronensis carmina, ed. by Aldo Manetti (Bergamo: Istituto universitario di Bergamo, 1985), pp. 61-62. My translation.

Gordius Worm

Gordius ssp. (铁线虫属).

During our annual Autumn trip to Hengshan we found a disoriented mantis (hierodula chinensis), stumbling around our hotel at night. We placed it in a container with a little water and three of these gordius worms rapidly came out. Most likely the unlucky mantis has been carrying these horsehair worms in her abdomen for months and were drawing her towards water: to drown and allow the worms to escape, lay eggs and continue their cycle of life.

The Beginning of the End of Civilisation

Ray Bradbury (as reported by Kingsley Amis):

In writing the short novel “Fahrenheit 451,” I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.

Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell (London: New English Library, 1969; 1960), p. 96.

Marvel of Peru

Marvel of Peru (Mirabilis jalapa, 紫茉莉).

As the name suggests, it is a South American flower, but here it was blooming along a mountain road on Hengshan.

Bald Heads

Knowledge is the web to be filled and colored with feeling and desire. Looking back to the curiosities and perceptions of boyhood’s years, I recall my capture by phrenology. A shop was given to it on Broadway, where I bought a plaster head showing all the bumps. Church hours were beguiled by the study of bald heads around me.

Henry Osborn Taylor, A Historian’s Creed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939), pp. 80-81.

Hemiboea Subcapitata

Hemiboea subcapitata (降龙草).

This plant can be found throughout southern China, though this is the first time I have encountered it in the wild, flowering in Taohualing Park. Perhaps I would have observed it more often if I paid more attention to plants when they are not in flower.

Indian Zehneria

Indian Zehneria (Zehneria japonica, 马㼎儿).

This is the first time I have seen this gourd on Yuelu Mountain, though I have come across them in nearby areas. There was only one: hanging on a single vine with withered leaves.

Autumn's Tree

O autumn winds that bake and burn
And all the world to darkness turn,
Now storm and seize and make of me...
A swarm of leaves from Autumn's Tree!

Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 67.

Persicaria Criopolitana

Persicaria Criopolitana (蓼子草).

Not the most common knotweed in and about Changsha, but in late October and throughout November, its clusters of flowers can reliably be found in the mudflats along the Xiang River, though one might have to walk around for a few kilometres before finding them.

Ghosts of Mani

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2006; 1958), p.79:

In summer, ghosts are said to roam the Mani in the hottest hour of the day, in winter at the darkest hour of the night. If their mortal predecessors have been killed by an enemy, they wail for revenge. Summer ghosts haunt graveyards, ruined churches and cross roads. A man’s blood is supposed to shout out loud the day before he dies and if he perishes by violence his blood remains wet on the spot until a wooden cross is driven into the ground there; then it dries up or drains away. (The Maniots have a death fixation which is almost Mexican; perhaps the blazing light, the naked rock and the cactuses engender the same processes in either place.) The dead are turned into werewolves until forty days after their death and, stealing indoors at night, they eat the dough out of the kneading-troughs—any trough that is empty when it should be full is a werewolf’s work. Witches are said to lead people in a trance up the mountain-side at dead of night to torture them there. Regular sleepwalkers, of which there seem to be a number, are known as the string-loparméni, the witch-taken ones. Then there is a terrible devil called Makrynas,[1] “the faraway one,” who invariably appears in deserted places in the haunted hour of noon. I have not been able to learn what he looks like or what harm he does, but he is usually encountered by women who run away shrieking in panic through the rocks and olives. Could he be Pan himself, up to his old game with the latterday descendants of Syrinx and Echo? The nereids, the oreads, the dryads, the hamadryads and the gorgons all survive transposed in the minds of country Greeks. The Faraway One may be the chief woodland god himself.

Tangerine

Tangerine (Citrus deliciosa, 莽山野桔).

An citrus fruits are plentiful in Hunan, in every season, but this tangerine one was growing wild on 'Phoenix' Mountain (凤凰山).

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.

Sleep Song

'Deirín dé'

       Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Tá an bunnán donn ag laḃairt san ḃféiṫ;
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Tá an túirnín lín amuiġ san ḃfraoċ.

        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Ġeoḃaiḋ ba siar le héirġe an lae;
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Is raġaiḋ mo leanḃ dá ḃfeiġilt ar féar.

        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Éireoċaiḋ gealaċ is raġaiḋ grian fé;
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Tiocfaiḋ ba aniar le deireaḋ an lae.

        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Leigfead mo leanḃ ag piocaḋ sméar,
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Aċt codlaḋ go sáṁ go fáinne an lae!

 
'A Sleep Song'

        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
The brown bittern speaks in the bog;
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
The nightjar is abroad on the heath.

        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Kine will go west at dawn of day;
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
And my child will go to the pasture to mind them.

        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Moon will rise and sun will set;
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
Kine will come east at end of day.
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!
I will let my child go gathering blackberries,
        Deirín dé, deirín dé!

Pádraic H. Pearse, Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse, 5 vols (Dublin: The Phoenix Publishing Co., 1924), II, pp. 108-11.

Pearse's notes on the poem:

The Sleep Song which I add as a pendant to the song of childhood and death [this refers to the previous poem in the anthology: Pádraig Ó hÉigeartaigh's ‘Ochón! A Dhonncha’] I have pieced together from my recollection of a song; that I heard in my own childhood from the woman to whom I owe all my enthusiasms. Where my memory has failed I; have filled in the; lacunae from a version of the; same lullaby taken down in West Cork by Mr. Amhlaoibh Lynch. The refrain “deirín dé” is the name given by children to the last spark at the end of a burning stick used in certain games. With the thought in stanzas 2 and 3 compare Sappho’s “Hesperus, thou bringest back all that daylight scattereth, thou bringest the lamb and the; goat to fold, thou bringest the infant to its mother.”

Eurasian Wild Pig Jawbone

Eurasian Wild Pig (Sus scrofa, 野猪).

There are wild pigs in Hunan but they do not often enter into the cities. One must have gotten close as this jawbone was deposited by a stream in Taohualing Park.

Butterflies in the Autumn Sun

Blue Admiral (Kaniska canace) and Asian Comma (Polygonia c-aureum) by Taozi Lake, enjoying the warm sun, while it lasts.

Helios Elijah

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006; 1966), p. 44:

His mountain-top shrines make the prophet Elijah especially revered. (Elias in Greek; the nomads call him “St. Lios.” When the Greek world went Christian he took over the hilltop fanes to Helios-Apollo, on the strength of his name and partly because both their careers ended in the sky in fiery chariots.)[18] “He’s a mountain man like us,” they say, “he lives in the wilderness and wanders from peak to peak. He helps us and we hallow him.” The Blessed Virgin is addressed under one of her many epithets; they call her Parigorítissa, the Consolatrix; as an alien and a woman who has somehow insinuated herself into their midst, her honours are fairly cursory. St. Paraskeví is another female saint with some status. Each stani—each “fold,” clan or gathering of families and huts—has its own feast day, fortuitously depending on chapels that lie in their favourite pastures. Some have won general acceptance: the Assumption—like Elijah’s, the eponymous churches often perch on mountains; St. Constantine, the champion of Hellenism; the Deposition and the Purification; and in the Agrapha mountains, the Nativity of the Virgin, thanks to her great monastery there, hard of access in the Proussos gorge. Our Lady of Vella, between Yanina and Konitza, is honoured for a like reason. St. Athanasios is not cultivated as a Doctor of the Church, but, unexpectedly, as a warden of flocks. They neglect his January name-day because it falls in lambing-time and celebrate it later in the year. The fondness of Macedonian Sarakatsáns for St. John the Baptist is probably due to his shaggy iconographic outfit: it looks far more like their own goat-skin homespun than camel-hair; he lived in the wilderness too. They boil beans on his feast day and distribute and eat them in church. The bean-feast is linked with pagan magic ceremonial at harvest time and commemorates, almost certainly, the Pyanepsia when the ancients boiled and ate broad beans to bring fertility and a year of plenty.

Chinese Sweetgum Leaves

Chinese Sweetgum (Liquidambar formosana, 枫香).

For the most part, Autumn has not yet stripped the forest of its foliage, but the sweetgum trees have been one of the first to surrender their leaves. The leaves are colourful, useful (for feeding silkworms) and fragrant with a ripened sweat-and-sour odour.

Pirate Priests

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2006; 1958), p. 127:

No pirate enterprise of any consequence was complete without a priest. He blessed the expedition at its outset, prayed for fair weather for his parent ship and foul weather for the enemy and interceded for the souls of his fallen messmates. He absolved the sins of his floating flock and saw to it that a share of the loot, often wet with blood, was hung beside the ikons on the mainmast as a votive offering. If more than eight days passed and no prize came their way, he would intone a litany on the deck, and when a prospective prize was sighted he would level a matchlock over the bulwarks with the rest and join the boarding party with khanjar and scimitar.

Oriental Blechnum

Oriental Blechnum (Blechnum orientale, 乌毛蕨).

Another Yuelu mountain fern, which is widely distributed over subtropical and tropical Asia, showing a little Autumn colour.

Literature is Play

The rules of genre and of prosody, often so arbitrary, so fantastically elaborate, the terrain of profound yet somehow enfranchised seriousness on which the poet manoeuvres, suggest that he is playing a game–albeit the noblest, most consequential game man has so far devised. To the extent that it is language in a condition of autonomy, that it operates within conventional, non-utilitarian rules, all literature is play.

George Steiner, ‘Introduction’, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, by Johan Huizinga (London: Paladin, 1970), pp. 9-16 (p. 12).

Woodwardia Japonica

Woodwardia japonica (狗脊).

This medium-sized leptosporangiate fern is one of the most common ferns on Yuelu Mountain. I keep intending to pay more attention to local ferns. Perhaps this season I will make an effort to keep better track of the ones I see and identify unfamiliar species. Perhaps there will be other distractions.

What’s In a Name?

Alexander Vanautgaerden, Autoportraits d’Érasme. Zelfportretten van Erasmus. Selfportraits of Erasmus (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), p. 93:

Born in Rotterdam, Geert Geritzoon (Geert, son of Gerit), he would have to undergo a profound metamorphosis, if he was to impress the international scene. Rotterdam, at the end of the XVth century did not have the same renown as nowadays. For an Italian, a Rotterdammer was, at best, a provincial hick and, at worse, a barbarian. Geert Latinizes his name by using the antiquarian form of the trinomen. Geert means “to desire” in Dutch, thus “Desiderius”. The humanist then Hellenized his name; transforming “erasmios” (the beloved) to “Erasmus”, instead of “Erasmius” which would have been the correct way of spelling it: a beginner’s error that the humanist would regret throughout his life.

Blue Plumbago

Blue Plumbago (Plumbago auriculata, 蓝花丹).

Another foreign flower that must have translated from gardens to the semi-wild lower reaches of Yuelu Mountain: this one is of South African origin.

Latin Verse Composition

Gregory Griffin [pseudonym], ‘N° 28. On Translation’, The Microcosm, 2nd edn (Windsor: Published for C. Knight, 1788), pp. 320-28 (pp. 321-22 [Monday, 28 MAY 1787]):

   The composition of Latin verse has always been the characteristic of Eton; and though it has frequently been attacked as too superficial an accomplishment to be held up as the first object, it is certain, that without it, the elegances of the language are never to be attained; and the very pronunciation is often erroneous from ignorance of accent and quantity. The Archieves of our state are filled with the first efforts of expanding genius; and so profusely bountiful is this poetic mania, that there is not a cubic foot in father Thames, but is so ornamented with Naiads, as to force some of them up the neighbouring ditches, for the accommodation of the majority: nor a tree in our campus martius but has at least its brace of Dryads, though there is not a single oak among them. Nay, the learned compiler of the Musae Etonensis has, in his preface, purely for the amusement of passers by, crammed more poets of all sorts and sizes, into a bench, which a dozen starveling sonneteers might fill with ease, than any nine Muses in the world could take care of at once.

Mexican Ruellia

Mexican Ruellia (Ruellia simplex, 蓝花草).

Lovely purple Fall flower from South America: they are fairly common in Changsha urban gardens but these have run wild on Yuelu Mountain.