The Aorta’s Rhythm

Amazon.cn works. I ordered English books on line in Beijing on Sunday and they were in my hands on Monday.  I know . . . half a billion people may have already figured out something not dissimilar.  And Americans take all that for granted.  But for all sorts of reasons mostly to do with payment methods, Taobo and JD.com are not convenient options.  Amazon.cn though, took my U.S. card and today, I’ve got my books. 

Now I just spent some time in the lavatory with Lord Byron.  ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage' is a sweeping outcast’s ride across Europa.  Quickly I’m back in Sintra although he spells it with a ‘C’ thirty kilometers north east of Lisbon.  I’d learned when visiting a few years back that he’d been struck by it.  Now he’s reminding me why and I’m remembering the walk my daughters and I took there among the crenulated, faux gothic gardens there in the hills, ordering a local dish called ‘duck rice’, which everybody thought was amazing, despite its name.

Reading poetry reminds me of meditation:  the object is to slow down.  Meditating I try, among other things, to slow my heart down.  Physically it is possible to sense the aorta’s rhythm and will it, slightly, slower.  At least I think that’s what I’m doing.  I’m probably influenced by a college course I took on Buddhism, which suggested that Tibetan monks could slow their resting heart rate slower than doctor’s believed possible. My efforts and results are decidedly more modest.

Reading Byron one can scan a page or two and realize one hasn’t absorbed anything beyond a flash or two of insight.  Verse was meant to be read aloud though I’m not sure I want to broadcast Byron from within the bathroom But I can read it audibly nonetheless.  And now I can sense the intended rhythm and rhyme if I’m proceed, line by line, by line.  And slowing down is easy, for a moment.  But, in my case at least, it takes great discipline to not suddenly race off.   Especially as I now have a few more books coming. 

Monday, 3/06/17