They Breathe as People

I’m caught up.  This was a battle.  You dear reader might not know but it wasn’t easy catching up on these last five weeks.  Time doesn’t stop and with each day’s effort to catch up the past, the future ran off ahead of me. I thought of Fyodor Dostoyevsky more than once and how he wrote to stay alive.  He wrote to pay the rent.  He sold his chapters off, week by week to get creditors off his back.  He wrote as if it were a battle. 

Standing in line for a cab just now, I couldn’t write.  But that’s OK.  I could read and I was in the final twenty pages of Saul Bellow’s Herzog, which finds him back in the Berkshires, before that place was all that I’ve ever known it to be.  He’s had a tough time of it but he’s back among the horse chestnuts and the elms on his property.  The Jam came on my headphones suddenly, with "In the City" during the walk over from the elevator, which would be and was delightful, but not for reading Bellow, so I put Rick, Bruce and Paul on pause and tried to kill the twelve minutes of winter waiting in the novel’s culmination.  English suddenly from behind me in line.  A young American girl with a loud flat voice was making uninspired observations about her flight and the food and laughing loudly.  I considered arming myself with bee bop I could read to shut her voice out. 

Taiwan was a lovely trip this weekend.  Lord knows I don’t need any little trips but I appreciated the strange other version of what Chinese is or might be.  I appreciated greatly staring at the haunted traditional Chinese characters one sees everywhere.  They breath as people say they do.  Simplified characters seem broken and stunted in comparison.  How that must have saddened a generation of people to watch the fullness of the calligraphy be everywhere stunted. 

But certainly the respect for what the mother country has been able to achieve waxes and there isn’t a clear interruption in sight.  Wrong sighted choices that that revolutionary generation made were legion but would any of this have been possible without those sacrifices?  Perhaps it would simply have unfolded differently with different victims and different dangers, different triumphs and affinities. 

Now I must hop on line,  later tonight and begin posting all these back entries.  Tonight, Sunday night, is when I will need to make some progress.  It always takes longer though than you expect and I have many, many things to post.  Certainly, I had considered throwing in the towel on this effort, more than once.  Sooner or later I will.  Someday, though, it ought prove interesting.  Certainly it is a mighty means by which to capture the progression of the days in a way that the mind could never do. 

Sunday, 11/26/17