Some Magic, I Suppose

Qing style mansion.  It is located out in Haidian, so it can’t be real, can it?  The young man who walks me out down the long driveway, suggests it is, in fact a repurposed, older mansion.   What’s that doing out in Haidian?  Wasn’t Haidian just farmland?  I will have to look up just what it was and why it’s here.

At the gate I meet my guest and we are given the Qing Dynasty movie set treatment.  We must walk between the phalanx of guests who welcome us, step up over the stone entry way and proceed to the pleasant, if freezing courtyard.  A young lady a traditional hanfu outfit shows us to a baojian room, of course, which fortunately has contemporary heating.  We are presented with a tome of a menu and she sinks her hands back into the unisleeve and heads outside clattering along in her flower pot shoes.

The food was OK, but the conversation was remarkable and this new acquaintance and I have become fast-friends and I must credit our private room in the make believe urban garden with some magic, I suppose.  Leaving, my young fella escort tells me that this was the villa of a Prince Li from the days of Nuerhachi.  All I can see when he says this is the mean older brother of Dorgon from the 90's TV series we made kids watch, back-in-the-day.   

Reading about Robespierre today.  Carlyle has him out to be a butcher, a zealot and a fool, pure and simple, who had illusions of messiah-hood, an appetite for creating a new religion and the will to condemn others with abandon.  I looked on line and considered that he was, of course, a more complicated figure whom some loved and others hated.  There is a square named after him there in Paris, popular, presumably with the Yellow Vests.  Lenin had a statue commemorated but it wasn’t well built and it quickly fell apart.  Vladimir apparently said, (antedating Orson Wells) “He was a Bolshevik . . . before his time.”  But while these Jacobins had a vision, wherein the means always seemed to justify the ends, it is interesting to note the absence of a theory, like Marxism, to guide them, nor any real party mechanism, like Bolshevism, to organize their passions and defend their gains.  Reviewing the prior helps to explain the rise of the latter, and though Bolshevism lasted much longer, it also fell victim to the same internal frenzy of backstabbing. 

Friday 12/14/18