Language as an Art

Joel Elias Spingarn (1875-1939), Creative Criticism and Other Essays (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1931), pp. 49-50:

The fact that two lines have the same external succession of beats or accents, conform or do not conform to the same “metre,” follow or do not follow some traditional system of versification, tells us no more about their intrinsic quality as poetry than the fact that two men have the same bones or the same lymphatic system tells us about their special qualities as statesmen, as friends, or as men.

What is true of metre is also aesthetically true of language itself. To speak of “learning a language” is to risk the danger of the same confusion, for we do not learn language, we learn how to create it.

Indian Chrysanthemum

Indian Chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum indicum, 野菊).

Today was cool but sunny, so in the early afternoon I perambulated around Yuelu Mountain. Along one of the paths where the sun could easily penetrate the tree line there was a single large display of chrysanthemum flowers, servicing a host of flies and a few honey bees.

Monnier's Snowparsley

Monnier's snowparsley (Cnidium monnieri, 蛇床).

There has been an efficient onslaught of cold weather: most birds and insects were hiding. Some Autumn flowers are still taking in whatever sunlight they can. And near the Xiang river there is still plenty of cnidium flowering. This plant is a resourceful weed with has a long history in herbal medicine, in particular for skin ointments and as an aphrodisiac.

Anonymity

    It seems paradoxical that an article should impress us more if it is unsigned than if it is signed. But if does, owing to the weakness of our psychology. Anonymous statements have, as we have seen, a universal air about them. Absolute trust, the collected wisdom of the universe, seems to be speaking, not the feeble voice of man. The modern newspaper has taken advantage of this. It is a pernicious caricature of literature. It has usurped the divine tendency towards anonymity. It has claimed for information what only belongs to creation. And it will claim it as long as we allow it to claim it, and to exploit the defects of our psychology.

E.M. Forster, Anonymity: An Enquiry (London: Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1925), pp. 20-21.

Pallas's Squirrel

Pallas's Squirrel (Callosciurus erythraeus, 赤腹松鼠).

There are not many wild mammals on Yuelu Mountain, but near the Hunan Normal University campus there is one reclusive Pallas' squirrel that can sometimes be seen jumping from tree to tree. I see him once every two or three months, and only when the weather or term vacations have driven away the usual crowds of students and tourists. More rarely I have seen him mid-way up the mountain along some of the rugged footpaths north of the college. Perhaps there are other squirrels elsewhere on the mountain but I have not observed them.

On Sudden Death

José Miguel João de Portugal e Castro, Marquis of Valença and Count of Vimioso (1706-1775):

‘De repentina morte’
 
De brevitate queri vitae nos saepe solemus;
   Cum mage sit nobis mors metuenda brevia

'On sudden death'
 
We often complain of how life passes by so swiftly, when a swift death ought to be more worrisome to us.

José Miguel J. de Portugal, Epigrammatum liber unus (Lisbon: ex praelo Michælis Rodrigues, 1732), p. 35. My translation.

Indian Lettuce

Indian Lettuce (Lactuca indica, 翅果菊).

This biennial herb can grow quite tall, but along the Xiang river this Autumn it has seldom grown beyond 30 to 40 centimeters in height. It has been growing taller on Yuelu Mountain, surpassing one meter where it has unimpeded access to the sun. The leaves are edible, but slightly bitter. The stem can also be cut for its sap: its mild lactucarium is a useful digestive.

The Golden Mean

ἔστιν ἄρα ἡ ἀρετὴ ἕξις προαιρετική, ἐν μεσότητι οὖσα τῇ πρὸς ἡμᾶς, ὡρισμένῃ λόγῳ καὶ ᾧ ἂν ὁ φρόνιμος ὁρίσειεν. μεσότης δὲ δύο κακιῶν, τῆς μὲν καθ᾽ ὑπερβολὴν τῆς δὲ κατ᾽ ἔλλειψιν: καὶ ἔτι τῷ τὰς μὲν ἐλλείπειν τὰς δ᾽ ὑπερβάλλειν τοῦ δέοντος ἔν τε τοῖς πάθεσι καὶ ἐν ταῖς πράξεσι, τὴν δ᾽ ἀρετὴν τὸ μέσον καὶ εὑρίσκειν καὶ αἱρεῖσθαι.
 
Virtue then is a habit of mind concerning choice, consisting in the mean relative to us, determined with reference to reason, as a sensible man would define it. It is a middle ground between two evils: one of excess and one of deficiency; because one of these vices falls short of what is proper and the other goes beyond it, both in passions and in actions, where virtue finds and chooses the mean.

Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea, 1106b-1107a. My translation.

est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines
quod ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum.
 
There is a mean in things, and there are certain boundaries, beyond which and short of which, virtue is not able to find a place.

Horace, Sermones I.106-7. My translation.

A Small Plot of Earth

O nimium felix possessum quisquis agellum
Desidis exercet pulso torpore veterni.
 
O exceedingly happy is he who cultivates his own small plot of land, when the stupor of enervating drowsiness strikes.

Wilfred P. Mustard, The Eclogues of Faustus Andrelinus and Ioannes Arnolletus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1918), p.38 [Publii Fausti Andrelini ecloga V.6-7]. My translation.

Tagasta tonkinensis

Tagasta tonkinensis (越北橄蝗).

There are many species of grasshoppers in Hunan but I have hitherto afforded them little attention: next year I hope to more carefully note and identify the various orthopteras I see by the river, on Yuelu Mountain, and further afield. This one I observed last September 7th: from July until mid-October they were often in the wilds by the Xiang river but they are gone now.

One wonders if the name of the genus refers to Thagaste, the Numidian village and famed birthplace of St Augustine. The ancient town lay in a valley but the adjacent forested hilltops were long a natural fortification against foreign invaders. The genus falls under the family Pyrgomorphidae (a remarkably colourful grouping of grasshoppers), which derives from πύργος, a 'defensive tower', because their heads vaguely resemble towers. It would take some imagination to envision the towered forts of Thagaste in this little insect, but the image does the trick as a mnemonic.

My Father Wrought

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 63:

   Almost thirty years ago, in a poem called ‘Follower’, I wrote about myself as a child dragging along behind my father when he was out ploughing. The poem began:
                     My father worked with a horse-plough,
and as unremarkable as this may have been as a line of verse, it was still the result of some revision. Originally I had written:
                     My father wrought with a horse-plough,
because until relatively recently that verb was the common one in the speech of mid-Ulster. Country people used the word ‘wrought’ naturally and almost exclusively when they talked about a person labouring with certain tools or animals, and it always carried a sense of wholehearted commitment to the task. You wrought with horses or with a scythe or with a plough; and you might also have wrought at hay or at flax or at bricklaying. So the word implied solidarity with speakers of the South Derry vernacular and a readiness to stand one’s linguistic ground: why, then, did I end up going for the more pallid and expected alternative ‘worked’?
   The answer is, I suppose, because I thought twice. And once you think twice about a local usage you have been displaced from it, and your right to it has been contested by the official linguistic censor with whom another part of you is secretly in league. You have been translated from the land of unselfconsciousness to the suburbs of the mot juste.

Creeping Woodsorrel

Creeping Woodsorrel (Oxalis corniculata, 酢浆草).

These buttery yellow ground flowers begin to creep out of the green crowded earth every Fall and more appear whenever it rains until at least late Spring. According to Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China (vol. 3 p. 678), medieval Chinese scientists discerned how to locate copper deposits in the earth from the trace accumulations that build up in their lemon-flavoured trifoliate leafs.

Mock Strawberry

Mock Strawberry (Potentilla indica, 蛇莓).

Stoloniferous, it fortifies its positions close to the ground and is virulently resistant to human aggression: whether by foot or by mover. In exchange for our disturbances it offers bland (and slightly crunchy) red berries and trifoliate leaves, which provide a good poultice for insect bites and (I am told) burns as well. Along the Xiang river have found single berries here and there since midsummer, but they are now more numerous, often appearing in groups of five or six drupes.

Ignorance Increases with Reading

Bernard Berenson, One Year's Reading For Fun (1942) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), p. 59 [5 May 1942]:

As I have occasion to consult a volume of Deutsche Biographie, I look at all items of interest. They consist of entries for people known to me not only as names but even as careers and values they are people, however, about whom I have never read a biographical account. How much one would like to know more about what one cannot give time to. One's ignorance increases as one reads. One finds persons, places, events referred to, whether hitherto unmentioned or too vaguely to satisfy, and one hungers for more till either accident or imperative need drives one to procure information.