Preface
It's a completely gorgeous Saturday! We were promised a freak snowstorm, that snowstorm failed to materialize, it's a great day to go for a walk, and guess where I am? At work. In the library. Like I do on alternating Saturdays. And it's a little chilly in here.
I'd say interesting things about my life right now but there isn't anything going on -- I'm turning 21 on Monday. (I work until midnight at the library on Mondays; getting snockered is mostly out of the question [and it's a Monday, do I seem like an alcoholic to you, Rachel and Eddi are exempt from answering that question]; I may spike my thermos of tea in the spirit of things.) I've been watching a lot of good TV and movies and reading good books, though not as many or as quickly as I feel like I should be.
And speaking of books, my copy of Unmaking the West came in today through ILL. It's relevant to the Thing That Me and talkjive are Working On, on and off. (We saved the Byzantine Empire! For another three hundred years at least! And we saved the Aztecs, too, and civilized most of the New World to boot! ...now what.)
Imagine a book that began:
We Chinese take our primacy for granted. We are one of the oldest civilizations in the world and the oldest continuous culture in existence. Every day our much sought after products, specialty agricultural goods, and products of popular and high culture are exported to every corner of the glove. Our language and culture have spread far beyond the river valleys where they originated; currently, almost two billion non-Han people speak or understand standard Chinese. It is the universal language of science, transportation, and business. With the exception of a minor European country and its former New World colony along that banks of the Zian-te Lo-rent River, schoolchildren everywhere begin studying Chinese in their first year of school. Almost a third of all Han live overseas, intermingled with the peoples of the islands and archipelagos south of us or in the new continents they colonized. New Guangzhou, whose twelve million people are spread out in the valleys and hills of what used to be a desert bordering the far side of the great ocean, rivals Beijing in size and wealth. Its free and easy lifestyle, suitable to an automobile culture in a sun-drenched climate, seems to have an irresistible appeal to our own youth.
Did this have to be? Could China have failed to achieve the cultural and political unity that gave it a jump start on other regions of the world? ...Many people will refuse to take such questions seriously. We Han are a practical people, not given to flights of fancy: our language does not even include "would have been" tenses. ... The honorable historian En Hao Kar once compared counterfactual argument to mah-jongg: both are parlor games played by old women with time on their hands.
And while I'm at it, dailyascension's Iranophilia is infectious -- all you have to do to get me interested in something is to obsess about it in my general direction, though -- and so I'm 3/4 of the way through The Conference of the Birds. Here's a notably gruesome bit, in a book that's not really gruesome. Like, at all. I was like whoa.
When they were about to impale Hallaj, he only uttered these words: 'I am God.' They cut off his hands and feet so that he became pale from loss of blood. Then he drew the stumps of his wrists across his face saying: 'It will not do for me to look pale today or they will think I am afraid. I will redden my face so that when the bloody man who has carried out the sentence turns towards the gibbet, he will see that I am a brave man.'