"...y como a nuestro aventurero todo cuanto pensaba, veia o imiginaba le parecia ser hecho y pasar al mode de lo que habia leido, luego que vio la venta se le represento que era castillo con sus cuatro torres y chapiteles de reluciente plata, sin faltarle su puete levadiza y honda cava, con todos aquellos adherentes que semejantes castillos se pintan."
This is I suppose the central recurring joke of Don Quijote, and part of its claim to greatness. All that our hero thinks, sees, or imagines appears in the light of what he has read. He doesn't see the world straight on, and his taking a common inn for a castle introduces the first of an endless series of comic set pieces.
But do we see the world straight on, either? How has what we have read made us take inns for castles?
If I read the book of Genesis, and, in looking at my fellow human beings thereafter, see them as created in the image and likeness of God, am I seeing castles rather than inns?
And if I see the world in the light of reading Don Quijote de la Mancha, how do I think, see, or imagine the world differently?
Monday, November 16, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Welcome, Cosette
Those following the "dog thread" may recall the sad notice of the passing of the airedale Bonnie Brown of Old Town about a year and a half ago.
I am happy to report that, after a few visits to the local humane society, young Oliver, our surviving poodle/chihuahua, has joined us in welcoming Cosette, a similarly-marked, similarly-sized, same-aged poodle mix of some odd sort. Oliver has now survived the "shelter cold" Cosette brought home with her, and she, not so very long ago a stray and orphan of the storm, is now eating like a horse and generally dominating the poor fellow.
I am happy to report that, after a few visits to the local humane society, young Oliver, our surviving poodle/chihuahua, has joined us in welcoming Cosette, a similarly-marked, similarly-sized, same-aged poodle mix of some odd sort. Oliver has now survived the "shelter cold" Cosette brought home with her, and she, not so very long ago a stray and orphan of the storm, is now eating like a horse and generally dominating the poor fellow.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Les Miserables
For the better part of the last decade I have been reading, on and off, Hugo’s Les Miserables, in French. Last month, with mixed emotions, I came to the end.
Such a huge, sprawling mess of a book, with its melodrama, its labyrinthine plotting, its stupefying coincidences, its insane digressions. But it really is a wonder, both as an entry into a particular, spectacularly-detailed and long-gone Paris, and as a passionate affirmation of a series of simple and essentially Christian themes—redemption, forgiveness, self-sacrifice.
In this there is an interesting contrast to the other huge book I’ve read in French, Dumas’ Le Compte de Monte Cristo. There also, at least toward the very end, as one of the villains is literally driven mad with grief, the protagonist comes to realize the terrible inhumanity of vengeance—but this is only after we’ve been enjoying it royally for more than a thousand pages. The tale of revenge carries a deep satisfaction, but the tale of redemption is much harder to carry off.
It has to be said, I think, that Jean Valjean an impossible character. Such selflessness surely can’t reside in a real self. And yet, partly, I suppose, through the length of our association with him, he becomes flesh and blood, struggling against a social condemnation wildly out of proportion to his initial fault, carrying a secret, and an inner guilt, which, instead of paralyzing, impels him to extremes of charity and paternal love. We follow him, and we fear for him.
The difficulty of dramatizing this theme is underlined by the difficulty of translating it onto the screen. Reading, except aloud with another, is a solitary act. Wanting to share some of this with my family, as I approached the end, I bought a DVD of the Liam Neeson movie treatment, to watch with them after I had finished to book. I was determined not to watch the movie before finishing because, as a matter of fact, I didn’t know any of the plot before this reading, and I didn’t want the movie to spoil it. As if it might! The movie’s ending was utterly changed, the characters distorted, and the focus of the ending of the film was the death of Inspector Javert, whom Valjean watches die with indifference, and then joy. Not exactly vengeance, but close.
But then the movie treatment made Javert an evil man, and one of the burdens of the novel is to demonstrate that, cold as he was, Javert was not evil, but merely just. He demonstrates the inadequacy of justice, how it invariably turns on you. Indeed, I think Hugo was being consciously ironic when he titles the first book of the first part, “Un Just,” referring to the good bishop whose leading characteristic is, in fact, not justice, but mercy.
There is, of course, a real villain in the wretched Thenardier, but even he is redeemed somewhat by his ragged children, and of course, in the novel’s penultimate scene, his cruel attempt at extortion unwittingly leads to the final scene of tearful reconciliation. His evil is real, but good inexplicably and rather improbably always comes out of it, beginning, fantastically, in his looting the dead at Waterloo.
And I’ll pat myself on the back for reading it in French. It wasn’t easy, and I have to admit that it probably made me miss a lot, even while not knowing I was missing it. The long digression on criminal “argot” was, yes, a long exercise in bleeping over unintelligible sentences. But, still, I think there is an importance in knowing, “These are his words,” even if one doesn’t get them all. The difficulty of the language creates a barrier, but at least it’s a barrier one is aware of, unlike the barrier, too quickly forgotten, erected by the translator.
But even now, it starts to fade. Such is memory. “L’herbe cache et la pluie efface.”
Such a huge, sprawling mess of a book, with its melodrama, its labyrinthine plotting, its stupefying coincidences, its insane digressions. But it really is a wonder, both as an entry into a particular, spectacularly-detailed and long-gone Paris, and as a passionate affirmation of a series of simple and essentially Christian themes—redemption, forgiveness, self-sacrifice.
In this there is an interesting contrast to the other huge book I’ve read in French, Dumas’ Le Compte de Monte Cristo. There also, at least toward the very end, as one of the villains is literally driven mad with grief, the protagonist comes to realize the terrible inhumanity of vengeance—but this is only after we’ve been enjoying it royally for more than a thousand pages. The tale of revenge carries a deep satisfaction, but the tale of redemption is much harder to carry off.
It has to be said, I think, that Jean Valjean an impossible character. Such selflessness surely can’t reside in a real self. And yet, partly, I suppose, through the length of our association with him, he becomes flesh and blood, struggling against a social condemnation wildly out of proportion to his initial fault, carrying a secret, and an inner guilt, which, instead of paralyzing, impels him to extremes of charity and paternal love. We follow him, and we fear for him.
The difficulty of dramatizing this theme is underlined by the difficulty of translating it onto the screen. Reading, except aloud with another, is a solitary act. Wanting to share some of this with my family, as I approached the end, I bought a DVD of the Liam Neeson movie treatment, to watch with them after I had finished to book. I was determined not to watch the movie before finishing because, as a matter of fact, I didn’t know any of the plot before this reading, and I didn’t want the movie to spoil it. As if it might! The movie’s ending was utterly changed, the characters distorted, and the focus of the ending of the film was the death of Inspector Javert, whom Valjean watches die with indifference, and then joy. Not exactly vengeance, but close.
But then the movie treatment made Javert an evil man, and one of the burdens of the novel is to demonstrate that, cold as he was, Javert was not evil, but merely just. He demonstrates the inadequacy of justice, how it invariably turns on you. Indeed, I think Hugo was being consciously ironic when he titles the first book of the first part, “Un Just,” referring to the good bishop whose leading characteristic is, in fact, not justice, but mercy.
There is, of course, a real villain in the wretched Thenardier, but even he is redeemed somewhat by his ragged children, and of course, in the novel’s penultimate scene, his cruel attempt at extortion unwittingly leads to the final scene of tearful reconciliation. His evil is real, but good inexplicably and rather improbably always comes out of it, beginning, fantastically, in his looting the dead at Waterloo.
And I’ll pat myself on the back for reading it in French. It wasn’t easy, and I have to admit that it probably made me miss a lot, even while not knowing I was missing it. The long digression on criminal “argot” was, yes, a long exercise in bleeping over unintelligible sentences. But, still, I think there is an importance in knowing, “These are his words,” even if one doesn’t get them all. The difficulty of the language creates a barrier, but at least it’s a barrier one is aware of, unlike the barrier, too quickly forgotten, erected by the translator.
But even now, it starts to fade. Such is memory. “L’herbe cache et la pluie efface.”
Thursday, June 18, 2009
The Long Novel
It appears now that blogs are losing out to twitter, because blogs are too ponderous and wordy. So it got me thinking about "the long novel."
My admittedly arbitrary definition is simple: a novel longer than twelve hundred pages. Looking back, I can identify five of them read in the last thirty-five years: Don Quixote, War and Peace, Remembrance of Things Past, Le Compte de Monte Cristo, and Clarissa.
Dr. Johnson, on being told that Richardson was "tedious," replied that "If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment."
The contrast between story and sentiment is a good one. Some novels are long because they tell a long story. The Count of Monte Cristo certainly has sentiment--romance and vengence, primarily. But it is a great story of a vendetta, a complex story with many characters over many years, touching, true, at last, on the terrible interior toll, but the novel's focus is the plot, the rule undertaken, the trap, the execution, the satisfaction of an awful justice overtaking the wicked. One does not fret for the lack of a storyline.
By contrast, there is Proust's book. It's not quite true that nothing happens. But almost nothing, and three thousand pages is a lot of almost nothing. It is all surface, which is to say, all interior. It is the play of impressions, the minute observation of the overlooked, the exquisite analysis of motivation and judgement. It took me quite a few years to read, reading one of the seven parts once a year, happy to begin each, but happy to put each aside as completed, ready to substitute something with a commoplace plot.
But what to say about all of them? They slip out of the memory. They are too big to leave a single impression, like, say, Heart of Darkness. While being read they constitute something like a second life, presenting a complex of names and places and actions remote in time and place, with enough detail to feed the imagination, and with enough length to engage, like one's life, without any prospect or fear of termination anytime soon. But when I re-open them, I don't remember having been there.
Does what we don't remember change us? Surely it must. We don't remember very early childhood, but surely it changed us, made us. Does the experience of having read Don Quixote change one, even if the details are forgotten, the inns and roads, the absurd exchanges, fade beyond recall? How much of the vision remains, the detailed experience, of the insatiable knight, of the implacable count, of the virtuous and abandoned young woman, of the delicate socialite who, after a thousand pages, casually lets slip his first name?
So now, if you've paid any attention to what went before, I'm about four fifth of the way through Les Miserable, reading Hugo as I read Dumas, in French, something of a struggle for me. But it is a way to travel for one who, for various reasons, hasn't been able to travel, to see up close in this detail and that the great, pre-Haussman metropolis. Afterwards I hope to return to the first of the long novels, first read long ago, next, I hope, in the original Castellian, El ingenioso hidalgo, Don Quijote de la Mancha. Why read it again? Because that original impression, I suppose, never went away, and it's something worth renewing. Part of it is a simple desire to work on the Spanish language, but if that's all it is, surely it is arguable that one doesn't begin with the language as constituted in the seventeenth century.
My admittedly arbitrary definition is simple: a novel longer than twelve hundred pages. Looking back, I can identify five of them read in the last thirty-five years: Don Quixote, War and Peace, Remembrance of Things Past, Le Compte de Monte Cristo, and Clarissa.
Dr. Johnson, on being told that Richardson was "tedious," replied that "If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment."
The contrast between story and sentiment is a good one. Some novels are long because they tell a long story. The Count of Monte Cristo certainly has sentiment--romance and vengence, primarily. But it is a great story of a vendetta, a complex story with many characters over many years, touching, true, at last, on the terrible interior toll, but the novel's focus is the plot, the rule undertaken, the trap, the execution, the satisfaction of an awful justice overtaking the wicked. One does not fret for the lack of a storyline.
By contrast, there is Proust's book. It's not quite true that nothing happens. But almost nothing, and three thousand pages is a lot of almost nothing. It is all surface, which is to say, all interior. It is the play of impressions, the minute observation of the overlooked, the exquisite analysis of motivation and judgement. It took me quite a few years to read, reading one of the seven parts once a year, happy to begin each, but happy to put each aside as completed, ready to substitute something with a commoplace plot.
But what to say about all of them? They slip out of the memory. They are too big to leave a single impression, like, say, Heart of Darkness. While being read they constitute something like a second life, presenting a complex of names and places and actions remote in time and place, with enough detail to feed the imagination, and with enough length to engage, like one's life, without any prospect or fear of termination anytime soon. But when I re-open them, I don't remember having been there.
Does what we don't remember change us? Surely it must. We don't remember very early childhood, but surely it changed us, made us. Does the experience of having read Don Quixote change one, even if the details are forgotten, the inns and roads, the absurd exchanges, fade beyond recall? How much of the vision remains, the detailed experience, of the insatiable knight, of the implacable count, of the virtuous and abandoned young woman, of the delicate socialite who, after a thousand pages, casually lets slip his first name?
So now, if you've paid any attention to what went before, I'm about four fifth of the way through Les Miserable, reading Hugo as I read Dumas, in French, something of a struggle for me. But it is a way to travel for one who, for various reasons, hasn't been able to travel, to see up close in this detail and that the great, pre-Haussman metropolis. Afterwards I hope to return to the first of the long novels, first read long ago, next, I hope, in the original Castellian, El ingenioso hidalgo, Don Quijote de la Mancha. Why read it again? Because that original impression, I suppose, never went away, and it's something worth renewing. Part of it is a simple desire to work on the Spanish language, but if that's all it is, surely it is arguable that one doesn't begin with the language as constituted in the seventeenth century.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Philosophy, physics and personality
Though he truly would not have gotten where he did had he not stood on the shoulders of giants, Isaac Newton has as good a claim as any to have begotten a new era.
I came to the Principia Mathematica, in part, through frustration at trying to comprehend Einstein. Einstein's work itself takes much too much advanced mathematices for me to ever hope to get it from the root. But even his little book on Relativity, intended for a lay audience, baffles me after a pair of readings. I think each take, alternating with different popular treatments, becomes clearer. But there is still that sense of a veil I'll never overcome.
So, I thought, if the mathematics of the 20th century is incomprehensible, maybe that of the seventeenth isn't. The Principia is daunting, to look at, but maybe, in small bites, it might yield to understanding--especially since the University of California published a new English translation a few years back.
Now let me make clear I haven't yet spent enough time yet with the thing to know if I will make any headway. But I was given to a new train of thought in learning (through introductory material) that a great deal of the second of the three parts is given to refuting Descartes' "Principles of Philosophy," and its attempts to explain celestial mechanics with a notion of whirling vortici.
Now, in my head, Newton is a scientist, and Descartes a philosopher--even though Newton called his great work "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy." Part of the reason for that lies in the area of Newton's success and Descartes' failure; it was Newton whose "System of the World" successfully set out the laws that described the elliptical paths of the planets and other celestial objects in a comprehensive theory of gravity, undergirded by abstract notions of mass and force. Descartes is remembered for a more random miscellany of things: his method of doubt, his reworking of the ontological argument from the idea of "perfection," his notion of certainly as a function of clarity, his division of the world into the famous dualism of "thinking stuff" and "extended stuff." He does, granted, have a separate reputation among the mathematicians, and there I am not really ready to go.
But what strikes me as a great difference between Newton's Principia Mathematica and what I have perused of Descartes' Principia Philosophia (in the French translation of the Pleides edition) is the disabling ambition of Descartes. He goes for explaining it all, not just the motion of Jupiter, but the motion of his own hand. The same, it occurs to me, can be said for his contemporary Leibnitz, another universal genius, another master in the history of mathematics (of whom Newton boasted he had "broken his heart" in the controvery over the discovery of the calculus). Leibnitz's ambition toward comprehensiveness led him to an atomism which attempted to incorporate consciousness as a fundamental component of matter. It went nowhere (except, I suppose, into the History of Philosophy textbooks).
Newton's genius is not just his remarkable insight, his mathematical proficiency, his synthetic abilities, his geometrical talent for proof, but also his self-limitation. His "Motion of Bodies" says nothing about the motion of human bodies (except to the extent that we are dead weights when the subject of an outside force). His "System of the World" is really the system of gravitational equilibrium, an important part of the the world, but only a part. He does not lack philosophy, and the various "scholia" throughout the Principia can only be described as philosophical takes on space, time, and, toward the end, God, and something called "spirit," which may be what we call spirit, and which may be what we would call the electro-magnetic force.
Newton's fault, then, isn't so much his own as that of his followers who, dazzled by his successes, fail to see that his success is a result of his reduced scope, and his "system" a system of only part of the world, and by no means necessarily the most important. The failures of Descartes and Leibnitz remind us how far we are from a true "system of the world," when the mysteries of life and consciousness and spirit remain.
I came to the Principia Mathematica, in part, through frustration at trying to comprehend Einstein. Einstein's work itself takes much too much advanced mathematices for me to ever hope to get it from the root. But even his little book on Relativity, intended for a lay audience, baffles me after a pair of readings. I think each take, alternating with different popular treatments, becomes clearer. But there is still that sense of a veil I'll never overcome.
So, I thought, if the mathematics of the 20th century is incomprehensible, maybe that of the seventeenth isn't. The Principia is daunting, to look at, but maybe, in small bites, it might yield to understanding--especially since the University of California published a new English translation a few years back.
Now let me make clear I haven't yet spent enough time yet with the thing to know if I will make any headway. But I was given to a new train of thought in learning (through introductory material) that a great deal of the second of the three parts is given to refuting Descartes' "Principles of Philosophy," and its attempts to explain celestial mechanics with a notion of whirling vortici.
Now, in my head, Newton is a scientist, and Descartes a philosopher--even though Newton called his great work "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy." Part of the reason for that lies in the area of Newton's success and Descartes' failure; it was Newton whose "System of the World" successfully set out the laws that described the elliptical paths of the planets and other celestial objects in a comprehensive theory of gravity, undergirded by abstract notions of mass and force. Descartes is remembered for a more random miscellany of things: his method of doubt, his reworking of the ontological argument from the idea of "perfection," his notion of certainly as a function of clarity, his division of the world into the famous dualism of "thinking stuff" and "extended stuff." He does, granted, have a separate reputation among the mathematicians, and there I am not really ready to go.
But what strikes me as a great difference between Newton's Principia Mathematica and what I have perused of Descartes' Principia Philosophia (in the French translation of the Pleides edition) is the disabling ambition of Descartes. He goes for explaining it all, not just the motion of Jupiter, but the motion of his own hand. The same, it occurs to me, can be said for his contemporary Leibnitz, another universal genius, another master in the history of mathematics (of whom Newton boasted he had "broken his heart" in the controvery over the discovery of the calculus). Leibnitz's ambition toward comprehensiveness led him to an atomism which attempted to incorporate consciousness as a fundamental component of matter. It went nowhere (except, I suppose, into the History of Philosophy textbooks).
Newton's genius is not just his remarkable insight, his mathematical proficiency, his synthetic abilities, his geometrical talent for proof, but also his self-limitation. His "Motion of Bodies" says nothing about the motion of human bodies (except to the extent that we are dead weights when the subject of an outside force). His "System of the World" is really the system of gravitational equilibrium, an important part of the the world, but only a part. He does not lack philosophy, and the various "scholia" throughout the Principia can only be described as philosophical takes on space, time, and, toward the end, God, and something called "spirit," which may be what we call spirit, and which may be what we would call the electro-magnetic force.
Newton's fault, then, isn't so much his own as that of his followers who, dazzled by his successes, fail to see that his success is a result of his reduced scope, and his "system" a system of only part of the world, and by no means necessarily the most important. The failures of Descartes and Leibnitz remind us how far we are from a true "system of the world," when the mysteries of life and consciousness and spirit remain.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Poetry in parts
A post or two back I indicated I had ordered a book of Chinese poetry for beginners--in fact, How to Read Chinese Poetry, a self-styled "guided anthology" edited by Zong-Qi Cai, and published by Columbia.
Chinese poetry is one of those areas in which my ignorance is vast and profound. I had had, some years ago, a copy of a certain Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, which I enjoyed, but which was physically spoiled, somehow. Dropped in a rain gutter, something like that, and I never got around to replacing it.
Aside from that there was only Ezra Pound's Cathay, with a few pieces anthologized that I came across and always loved, especially "The River-Merchant's Wife," which ends:
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
But then there were those who said it was Pound and not Li Tai-Po, and how was I to tell?
The fidelity of a translation to the original is determinable only to the extent that you can make something out of the original. How accurate are the corresponding words, how closely is the form and the shape of the original preserved? And how can that be even guessed at with a language you know practically nothing about, like Chinese?
When I think back to my old Columbia Anthology I remember it was straightforward English verse, free verse as far as I remember, with no discernable form. Just Roman letters on the page.
Zong-Qi Cai's anthology provides the novice with a little more. With most poems we get the poem in three forms--the English translation, the original in Chinese characters, and a phonetic Pinyin romanization of the characters. This highlights the easily-overlooked fact that every poem has these three aspects: meaning, appearance, and sound. If I can read, I apprehend the meanings of the words automatically (though I may mistake one significance for another, or fail to grasp the meaning of the whole--see, e.g., Pound, Cantos).
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, and germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
It's hard to imagine how the sound of that passage could ever pass over into another language in substituting non-English words, meaning for meaning. Somehow, there is a sort of constant, a Heisenbergian limiting principle by which, if the meaning is preserved, the sound must fall short. And, short of learning the language, that's part of how I necessarily feel when looking at the dismembered parts of these Chinese poems: meaning, appearance, sound, which, passing from one to the other, I try to blur into a unity.
Chinese poetry is one of those areas in which my ignorance is vast and profound. I had had, some years ago, a copy of a certain Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, which I enjoyed, but which was physically spoiled, somehow. Dropped in a rain gutter, something like that, and I never got around to replacing it.
Aside from that there was only Ezra Pound's Cathay, with a few pieces anthologized that I came across and always loved, especially "The River-Merchant's Wife," which ends:
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
But then there were those who said it was Pound and not Li Tai-Po, and how was I to tell?
The fidelity of a translation to the original is determinable only to the extent that you can make something out of the original. How accurate are the corresponding words, how closely is the form and the shape of the original preserved? And how can that be even guessed at with a language you know practically nothing about, like Chinese?
When I think back to my old Columbia Anthology I remember it was straightforward English verse, free verse as far as I remember, with no discernable form. Just Roman letters on the page.
Zong-Qi Cai's anthology provides the novice with a little more. With most poems we get the poem in three forms--the English translation, the original in Chinese characters, and a phonetic Pinyin romanization of the characters. This highlights the easily-overlooked fact that every poem has these three aspects: meaning, appearance, and sound. If I can read, I apprehend the meanings of the words automatically (though I may mistake one significance for another, or fail to grasp the meaning of the whole--see, e.g., Pound, Cantos).
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, and germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
It's hard to imagine how the sound of that passage could ever pass over into another language in substituting non-English words, meaning for meaning. Somehow, there is a sort of constant, a Heisenbergian limiting principle by which, if the meaning is preserved, the sound must fall short. And, short of learning the language, that's part of how I necessarily feel when looking at the dismembered parts of these Chinese poems: meaning, appearance, sound, which, passing from one to the other, I try to blur into a unity.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Sensibility
I am continuing to read and enjoy Jacques Gernet's History of Chinese Civilization, but it is with a palpable sense of the extreme generality needed to cover such a huge subject in a single volume (I started to write "big subject" because the only obvious sign that this text is translated from French is the constant use of the word "big" where most English writers would use "large," "huge" or "enormous.").
The following passage, though, illustrates how even the sweeping generality can arrest one's attention with a hitherto unguessed explanation for a largely unconscious prior impression:
"We can attribute to Buddhism a deep and general transformation of sensibility: the new religion introduced into the Chinese world a taste for ornamentation, for the tireless repetition of the same motifs (a religious practice that was to give birth to wood engraving), a taste for the sumptuous (statues coated with gold, precious cloths, and so on), but also for the gigantic, the colossal. All these tendencies were in opposition to the classical tradition, which aimed at stripping away essentials, at vigorous conciseness, at exactness of line and movement."
This seems exactly right, even if, in fact, it would be surprising if ornament, repetition, and luxury were entirely absent from pre-Buddhist China. Strictly speaking, it might be more accurate to speak of the influence of Indian aesthetics than Buddhist religion. As we know, the beautiful spareness of the tradition will eventually return and itself give birth to the Buddhism of the Chan/Zen schools.
The following passage, though, illustrates how even the sweeping generality can arrest one's attention with a hitherto unguessed explanation for a largely unconscious prior impression:
"We can attribute to Buddhism a deep and general transformation of sensibility: the new religion introduced into the Chinese world a taste for ornamentation, for the tireless repetition of the same motifs (a religious practice that was to give birth to wood engraving), a taste for the sumptuous (statues coated with gold, precious cloths, and so on), but also for the gigantic, the colossal. All these tendencies were in opposition to the classical tradition, which aimed at stripping away essentials, at vigorous conciseness, at exactness of line and movement."
This seems exactly right, even if, in fact, it would be surprising if ornament, repetition, and luxury were entirely absent from pre-Buddhist China. Strictly speaking, it might be more accurate to speak of the influence of Indian aesthetics than Buddhist religion. As we know, the beautiful spareness of the tradition will eventually return and itself give birth to the Buddhism of the Chan/Zen schools.
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