With Sublime Confidence

Down below.  Down below are the arid plains of Bejing.  I’ve just finished up my time with Somerset Maugham on this flight.  A happy ending.  Philip finally surrenders to the here and now.  He’s no longer waiting for anything, his degree, his about-to-die uncle, his trip to Spain.  I’m been with Philip from his first years till his mid-life thirties for seven hundred pages or so.  It isn’t the sparse artistry of Waugh, where a snicker or a “right” can serve for a chapter’s worth of explanation.  Much of Philip’s interior is not left to the imagination.  At least Mildred didn’t return as anything other than an apiration at the end of “Of Human Bondage.” 

It’s one thing to read about someone’s old-man-of-thirty worries as a fifty-one year old.  I could do with a bit of thirty something.  I’m sure there are no shortage of septuagenarians who could do with a bit of fifty-something. 

Outside the mighty jet engine is shaking in the wind.  It’ a good thing we don’t concentrate on it all that to much.  Be a shame to see it fly off from it’s welding. The gent beside me is so proud and confident about China.  “I had thought about sending my kids over seas but now I think, I’ll keep them here.”  It reminds one of the naïve confidence of Americans, who are visiting early twentieth century Paris in “Of Human Bondage.”  They bounce around with sublime confidence, they boast of their country and they have money to burn. 

Lovely day.  At least up here at twenty-thousand feet.  Seems a bit hazy now as we descend closer to the ground.  I’ve had cabbies and business prospects and waitresses all comment on the important new environmental protection laws that the country has enacted.  Note the subtle power of the propaganda apparatus: the message even reaches me.  “This winter no one will burn coal.”  This seems noble but impossible to believe.  I can only assume the first really frigid morning will be one that waxes bituminous when you step outside to breath. The enforcement of impressive laws, is always China’s challenge.  But lets see.  Americans learned to not throw trash out the window of their cars in my generation, thanks to the not-so-subtle propaganda of the crying American Indian public service message we were all subjected to.

Outside, we’re not there yet.  But perhaps this winter will be a bit better.  Perhaps the propaganda message is contagious.  The first wretched day of poisonous air will no doubt disabuse me of this contagion.  Lower now, landing above a river which I do not recognize.  Let’s go to the country this weekend.  Perhaps I can talk them all into that. 

Friday 11/10/17