Summer Cicadas

‘Summer’
Lawrence Durrell

The little gold cigale
Is summer’s second god, the lovers know it,
His parched reverberating voice
Deepens the gold thirst of the noons
And follows the black sun’s long
Fig-ripening and vine-mellowing fall
So leisurely from heaven’s golden car
Day by successive day to end it all . . .

And where the Latin heat has stretched
The skin of valleys will his voice
Rubbing and scraping at the lover’s ear
Oracles of past suns recall,
Prodigals of leisure and brown skins,
Wine mixed with kisses and the old
Dreamless summer sleeps they once enjoyed
In Adam’s Eden long before the Fall.

Lawrence Durrell, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), p. 191.

Eastern Horse Cicada

Eastern horse cicada (Cryptotympana atrata, 黑蚱蝉).

Obstreperous male cicadas are everywhere now and when they are not singing, they seem to fly about blindly and with little purpose, as they usually return to the same perches.

Garden Balsam

Garden Balsam (Impatiens balsamina, 凤仙花).

Growing wild in the hills of Wangling Park. Long used in folk medicines for joint pains and stomach ailments, and more peculiarly, dying finger nails.

Reflection for the End of the Academic Year

    והיינו דאמר רבי חנינא: הרבה למדתי מרבותי ומחבירי יותר מרבותי, ומתלמידי יותר מכולן.

    And Rabbi Hanina said: Much have I learned from my teachers, and I have learned more from my colleagues than from my teachers, and from my students I have learned the most.

Babylonian Talmud, Taanit 7a:12. My Translation.

Plum Judy

Plum Judy (Abisara echerius, 蛇目褐蚬蝶).

A new encounter for me: the wet season form of this butterfly was flying around the top of Tianma Mountain, in Liuyang. Even when perched on a leaf it was in constant motion: turning and dancing.

Nature and the Book

 In Australia, nature and the book existed in a state of war. Summer damp and heat reacted with the bleach in paper to produce ‘foxing’; an apparently pristine book could be marred on every page by its rusty blotches. A few of Sydney’s arrogant varnish-brown cockroaches were likely to scuttle out of any carton you started to excavate, but other bugs were more insidious. Some could drill a perfect millimetre-wide tunnel through the heftiest tome. Others confined themselves to the surface. When a publisher coated his covers with the wrong sort of ‘size’, bugs headed for them in the millions, slithering under the dust wrapper to browse until the boards were covered with winding white tracks. Certain books were notorious for this fault. In a shelf devoted to works by Randolph Stow, insects always singled out his collection of poems, A Counterfeit Silence. ‘It was bound in a turquoise cloth that was sized with gelatine,’ remembers Sydney bookseller Nicholas Pounder. ‘Once a critical humidity was achieved, it was like aniseed to a hound; the silverfish and cockies would scamper, slavering.’ But people could do far worse damage than any insect. Annotations, underlinings and marginalia were common, the reader carrying on an exasperated conversation with the writer. A scribbled ‘Fool!’ in the margin was common, as was ‘Yes!’ or ‘No!’, with the occasional ‘So true!’ Obviously they never expected anybody else to read these books, since, even when they wrote ‘False’, they never explained why it was false.

John Baxter, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict (New York : Thomas Dunne, 2003; 2002) , p. 87.

White-banded Flat

White-banded Flat (Daimio tethys, 黑弄蝶).

An East Asian butterfly, found throughout much of China as well as Japan and Korea: another find from our weekend trip to Liuyang.

Useless Knowledge

   What is the attraction of [Charles] Reade? At bottom it is the same charm as one finds in R. Austin Freeman’s detective stories or Lieutenant-Commander Gould’s collections of curiosities—the charm of useless knowledge. Reade was a man of what one might call penny-encyclopaedic learning. He possessed vast stocks of disconnected information which a lively narrative gift allowed him to cram into books which would at any rate pass as novels. If you have the sort of mind that takes a pleasure in dates, lists, catalogues, concrete details, descriptions of processes, junk-shop windows and back numbers of the Exchange and Mart, the sort of mind that likes knowing exactly how a medieval catapult worked or just what objects a prison cell of the eighteen-forties contained, then you can hardly help enjoying Reade. He himself, of course, did not see his work in quite this light. He prided himself on his accuracy and compiled his books largely from newspaper cuttings, but the strange facts which he collected were subsidiary to what he would have regarded as his “purpose”. For he was a social reformer in a fragmentary way, and made vigorous attacks on such diverse evils as blood-letting, the treadmill, private asylums, clerical celibacy and tight-lacing.

George Orwell, ‘Charles Reade’ in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols (London : Secker & Warburg, 1968), II, pp. 34-37 (II, p. 34).

Indian Red Admiral

Indian Red Admiral (Vanessa indica, 大红蛱蝶).

A relative of the far more widespread painted lady (vanessa cardui), though it is darker and the uppersides of the wings are a deeper orange. I see both species in the forests and sometimes in urban spaces.

Tedium

Tedium is the worst pain.

John Gardner, Grendel (New York: Vintage Books, 1989; 1971), p. 138.

Allotraeus Rufescens

Allotraeus rufescens.

A small red long-horn beetle, basking in the rain on Tianma Mountain, Liuyang. My son noticed it on the bottom of a mossy step.

Faking It

There is a mythical story about Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, who co-starred in Marathon Man. At some stage of the filming the plot required Hoffman to be exhausted from sleeplessness. So Hoffman stayed awake for three nights until he was exhausted – and ready for filming. Olivier is reputed to have asked, ‘Have you ever thought of acting?’

There is a profound misunderstanding in this malicious anecdote about the nature of acting. A false opposition of technique (faking it) and method (living it), of trained Olivier versus literalist Hoffman. Acting is like literature in this respect. We read a book. We cry over the fate of its characters. We know the characters are not real. This is the theme of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: their fate is assigned by Stoppard’s title and Shakespeare’s antecedent play. They are fictions without back stories, they are without free will. Yet they have the illusion of free will – illustrated by the boat that takes them to England and their deaths. On the boat, they are free to walk around, to choose their movements, direct their actions – but they cannot alter the course of the boat or their destiny. Guildenstern reflects that the nails grow after death – an emblem of their situation. When they look for their pasts, they discover they are effectively non-existent. Is Hamlet their friend? Guildenstern tells Rosencrantz: ‘You only have their word for it.’

Craig Raine, Heartbreak (London: Atlantic Books, 2010), pp. 114-115.

Epicauta Hirticornis

Epicauta hirticornis (毛角豆芫菁).

Fairly common Hunanese burning blister beetle: I have seen them in the forested hills near Changsha (but never on Yuelu Mountain), but this one I saw today on a trip to Tianma Mountain (天马山), in the city of Liuyang.

A First Class Degree

A first in Greats left me neither a professional philosopher nor a professional historian; but it left me with a fierce love of sifting evidence and the power of not being fascinated into acquiescence when superior persons talked philosophy at me.

R.A. Knox, A Spiritual Aeneid (London: Longman, Green and co., 1918), p. 63.

Despite his first, the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlour game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilised existence.

Ian McEwan, Atonement (London: Vintage, 2011; 2001), p. 91.