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.
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 (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 is what reconciles me to it.
Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia (London: Constable & Company, 1933), p. 153.
'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 (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.
Blue Admiral (Kaniska canace) and Asian Comma (Polygonia c-aureum) by Taozi Lake, enjoying the warm sun, while it lasts.
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 (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.
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 (Blechnum orientale, 乌毛蕨).
Another Yuelu mountain fern, which is widely distributed over subtropical and tropical Asia, showing a little Autumn colour.
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 (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.
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 (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.
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 (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.
Harry C. Schnur, ‘Do-It-Yourself: How to Write Latin Verse’, The Classical Journal, 52.8 (1957), 353-57 (p. 353):
Writing Latin Verse demands compliance with certain fixed rules; it therefore challenges both intellect and imagination, very much like a chess problem, and provides a similar kind of satisfaction, with the added bonus of a modest feeling of creative achievement. This pursuit immensely increases our understanding of the Roman poets’ technique, difficulties and felicities: of meter, rhythm and sound. As a do-it-yourself hobby, moreover, it is both independent of the weather and much less costly than, say, collecting incunabula or Old Masters.
Japanese Premna (Premna microphylla, 豆腐柴).
They were in flower back from mid-March to late May on Yuelu Mountain. These trees as used in bonsai and the leaves can be used to back a edible jelly, similar in texture to tofu.
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain Of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MASS: Harvard University Press, 1964; 1936), p. 7:
There are, first, implicit or incompletely explicit assumptions, or more or less unconscious mental habits, operating in the thought of an individual or a generation. It is the beliefs which are so much a matter of course that they are rather tacitly presupposed than formally expressed and argued for, the ways of thinking which seem so natural and inevitable that they are not scrutinized with the eye of logical self-consciousness, that often are most decisive of the character of a philosopher’s doctrine, and still oftener of the dominant intellectual tendencies of an age.
Sticky Mouse-ear Chickweed (Cerastium glomeratum, 球序卷耳).
This picture was taken in mid-March. This chickweed flowerings all over southern China in March and April and fruits over May and June. The whole plant has been used in Traditional Chinese Medicine to clear away heat and cool the blood; the leaves are regarded as nutritious, though it is a more common feed for livestock than people.
The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection. But because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching. And seeing every nation affords not experience and tradition enough for all kind of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the languages of those people who have at any time been most industrious after wisdom; so that language is but the Instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. And though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in them as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man, as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only.John Milton, ‘Of Education’ in John Milton: a critical edition of the major works, ed. by Stephen Orgel & Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: OUP, 1991), pp. 226-36 (pp. 227-28).
Cerulean Flax-Lily (Dianella ensifolia, 山菅兰).
Photographed on August 21, in a park in Xiamen. They grow in some remoter parts of Hunan as well (though I think less abundantly than further towards the southern coasts) but I have never found them near to Changsha.
One thing at least is beyond controversy, that Latin was the schoolmaster of both the Romance and German tongues: and the scholar’s practice in a language immutable yet all but infinitely adaptable is invaluable to hobble-de-hoy languages not quite sure what to do with their feet.Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars (London: Constable, 1938; 1927), p. 215.
Blue Marsh Hawk (Orthetrum glaucum, 黑尾灰蜻). Male.
An Asian orthetrum with a particularly beautiful frosty blue abdomen: especially on the older males. They are fairly common throughout southern China and much of subtropical and tropical Asia but, for whatever reason, I have never seen one in Changsha. This picture is from Fuzhou last August.
Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic (London: Corgi Books, 1985; 1983), p. 242:
‘Sometimes I think a man could wander across the disc all his life and not see everything there is to see,’ said Twoflower. ‘And now it seems there are lots of other worlds as well. When I think I might die without seeing a hundredth of all there is to see it makes me feel,’ he paused, then added, ‘well, humble, I suppose. And very angry, of course.’
Quam vorax dapis heluo fuisti,Giovanni Matteo Toscano, Peplus italiae (Paris: ex officina Federic Morel, 1578), pp. 59-60. Cited and translated in George Hugo Tucker, Homo Viator: Itineraries of Exile, Displacement and Writing in Renaissance Europe (Geneva: Droz, 2003), p. 167.
Quam meri bromii siticulosus,
Heluo Petre tam vorax librorum
Eras, Castaliae et sititor vndae:
Ut nunquam fueris satur bibendo,
Et nunquam fueris satur legendo:
Sic te Cynthius hinc et inde Bacchus
Suis annumerant, parumque certum est
Cui gratus fueris magis sacerdos.
Yes, you were a voracious glutton for a fine spread,
With quite a thirst, yes, for the riotous god’s own pure wine,
But, Peter, no less voracious a glutton were you
For books, and a thirster after Castalian water:
Just as you were never sated with imbibing,
You were also never sated with reading:
Thus Apollo on the one hand, and Bacchus on the other,
Count you amongst their own, and it is hardly clear
To which of the two you were the more gratifying priest.
Another curious species that has given me pause: I have only seen one of these flies, back in early June on Yuelu Mountain. It was curled onto a fallen leaf and did not depart, even when disturbed. I was puzzled about what is was then, and I am still am now, albeit hopeful to solve this minor mystery.
Through we laugh at old songs and old yarns, nevertheless, they are the yarn with which we weave our picture of the world.Hope Mirrlees, Lud-In-The-Mist (London: Gollancz, 2008; 1926), p. 47.
Over the next year, I hope to make a better acquaintance with the multitudes of moths which dwell all over southern China. Perhaps next year, I will be better able to identify this attractive individual I observed by the river last July.
The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself; the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the Romantics revived them in order to escape from themselves.Brian Stock, ‘The Middle Ages as Subject and Object: Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism’, New Literary History, 5.3 (1974), 527-47 (p. 543).
He poured out hospitable glasses of ouzo, and the conversation switched to the difficulties of finding a market for fish, there was so much competition. There is a special delight in this early morning drinking in Greece.Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2006; 1958), p. 42.
Back on July 4, I saw a dozen of these dry jet-black mushrooms protruding sideways from the mossy slopes of Yuelu Mountain. Time was pressing, and I did not examine them more closely: perhaps I will see them again next year and venture an identification; perhaps I missed by chance and they will remain a mystery.
Stubble Rosegill (Volvopluteus gloiocephalus, 粘盖草菇).
The week promises to be busy, rainy and cloudy, and so affords a good opportunity to revisit some notes and photographs from the spring and summer; especially some observations that were interesting but still are a little uncertain. This fungus was photographed on March 20th in the mudflats of the Xiang River. It was impressively large: almost 20cm in height with a 9cm cap. My identification is not complete certain, but is based on its size, the presence of a white cap with free crowded white gills, the absence of a ring ring, a bag-like volva at its base, and a mild wasabi odour.
impius, imprudens, plagiarius, hircus, adulter,G.M.A. Carrara, Sermones Objurgatorii, ed. by Giovanni Baptista Giraldi (Milan: Pergamena, 1987), p .27 [Sermo V Contra iniquos iure consultos, 52-54]. My translation.
rura aliena colit, sua dat sulcanda colonis.
the impious, the ignorant, the plagiarist, the goat, the adulterer,
each ploughs another’s lands, while leaving his own to be ploughed by others
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.
ἡ εὔκαιρος χάρις, λιμῷ καθάπερ τροφὴ ἁρμόττουσα, τὴν τῆς ψυχῆς ἔνδειαν ἰᾶται.Heraclitus, Fragment 136. My translation.
Well-timed gratitude, like wholesome food for hunger, heals what is lacking in the soul.
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.
MEASURE OF THINGS.John Selden, Table talk: being the discourses of John Selden, Esq. (London: printed for Joseph White, 1789; 1689), pp. 83-84.
II. We measure the excellency of other men by some excellency we conceive to be in ourselves. Nash, a poet, poor enough (as poets used to be) seeing an alderman with his gold chain, upon his great horse, by way of scorn, said to one of his companions, “Do you see yon fellow, how goodly, how big he looks; why that fellow cannot make a blank verse.”
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.
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 Selden, Table talk: being the discourses of John Selden, Esq. (London: printed for Joseph White, 1789; 1689), pp .21-22.
*emended, from peace.
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.
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.
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 (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 (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 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.
[...[ 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).
There is no ‘verdict of history,’ other than the private opinions of the individual. And no one historian can possibly see more than a fraction of the truth; if he sees all sides, he will probably not see very deeply into any one of them.George Macaulay Trevelyan, ‘Clio, A Muse’, in Clio, a Muse, and Other Essays (London: Longmans, Green and co., 1949; 1913), pp. 140-176 (pp. 172-73).
Male Blue Pansy (Junonia orithya, 翠蓝眼蛱蝶).
It is the time of year when may junonia start appearing. The upper side of its wings are more colorful with its black and blue markings, but even with its wings closed, it is a substantial-looking butterfly.
Mesembrius bengalensis (斑腹粉颜蚜蝇).
There are many bees and hoverflies enjoying the flowers by the river. I have seen mesembrius peregrinus in Changsha by the river but have not managed to photograph one, yet. I am pretty certain this is in the same genus, possibly mesembrius bengalensis, but I am not certain.
Great poets seldom make bricks without straw; they pile up all the excellencies they can beg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries, and they set their own inimitable light atop of the mountain.Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1952; 1910), p. 162.
Asiatic Wishbone Flower (Torenia asiatica, 光叶蝴蝶草).
Today we picnicked in a forest meadow: there were many hopping insects (mostly crickets and grasshoppers) and small hopping frogs. Looking around in the grass there were also many of these small creeping herbs in flower.
Emily had discovered that she possessed this odd knack when she was six. By a certain movement of her eyes, which she could never describe, she could produce a tiny replica of the wallpaper in the air before her—could hold it there and look at it as long as she liked—could shift it back and forth, to any distance she chose, making it larger or smaller as it went farther away or came nearer. It was one of her secret joys when she went into a new room anywhere to “see the paper in the air.” And this New Moon paper made the prettiest fairy paper she had ever seen.L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon (London: Harrap Books, 1977; 1928), p. 50.
Translating is not quite impossible. But it is damnably difficult. And that is why , as has been said by others, the good translator of poetry is a rarer apparition even than the good poet.Donald Davie, 'The Translatability of Poetry', The Listener, 78 (28 Dec. 1967): 838-840 (p. 840).
Tropical Fritillary (Argynnis hyperbius, 斐豹蛱蝶). Female.
A few weeks ago I saw a great many tropical fritillary caterpillars: now the butterflies are out in full force.
Metoeca foedalis (污斑纹野螟).
Through a lot of trial and error I am trying to improve my skills at photographing very small subjects. One early result is this common pearl moth: it ranges across Africa, southern Asia, Australia and has been introduced to South America, though this one here was ranging no farther than around a cluster of shrubs in urban Changsha.
carmina uel caelo possunt deducere lunam,Virgil, Ecl. VIII.69-71. My translation.
carminibus Circe socios mutauit Vluxi,
frigidus in pratia cantando rumpitur anguis.
Songs can pluck the moon down from the sky, through song Circe transformed the companions of Ulysses [into swine], and through singing, the snake, cool in the meadow, is burst asunder.
I have always liked trains. The old ones were the best, of course, their soot-black engines venting bursts of steam and chuffing links of stylised white smoke, and the carriages rattling and yawing and the wheels violently clanging—so much might and effort, yet producing such a gay and toy-like effect. And then the way the landscape seemed to rotate like a vast, slow wheel, or to keep opening like a fan, and the telegraph wires dipped and slid, and birds flew past the window backwards, slowly, effortfully, like so many discarded bits of black rag.John Banville, Ancient Light (London: Viking, 2012), p. 187.
A common sight in Autumn in Changsha. It could be terias hecabe (宽边黄粉蝶) or eurema mandarina (北黄粉蝶): both species are apparently present in Hunan and they are not clearly distinguishable from any clear morphological characteristics.
