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.