I Found a Fragment

 

Sunday, chusan it is.  The third day of Lunar New Year.  The ancestors, who were welcomed into the physical world on the midnight turning of New Year’s Eve, were to have been sent home this morning with loud fireworks to scare away the ghosts.  I thought of it after the fact when my father and I were walking the other day.  His father, he suggested, had only left the country once, in the later part of his life, on a trip to Rome.  And he mentioned his mom, my grandmother and how good she was at Latin, unlike his husband. It was the morning of chuyi and there we were with both of his long-deceased parents invoked.  Later it seemed meaningful when I mentioned the tradition and we recalled that we’d been talking about the paternal ancestors. 

Later in evening we visited my mom and her husband.  Chuyi should be the time when you qiaomenr and visit nearby relatives and snack on some snacks and down a shot or two of baijiu.  And once again we found ourselves talking about my mom’s paternal line, as she was heading up to Albany the next day for her first Covid-19 vaccine shot, finally, and that’s the sod the paternal line hailed from.  I let them both know that beyond eating the dumplings we’d brought over they ought to know that the ancestors are all about the earth just now. 

 

I finished off the first volume of Joseph Needham’s “Science and Civilization in China.”  There are approximately twenty-six other such volumes in his remarkable series.  Like many I’m indebted to Simon Winchester who introduced me to Needham and the grand project in his account of Needham’s life in “The Man Who Loved China.”  I’d referenced Needham many times in my classes and always felt a bit disingenuous referencing his many volumed series examining the myriad seminal contributions to science originating from China though I’d never read a copy nor even seen a copy.  Out of print, Volume II is over one-hundred-and-fifty bucks on Amazon.  Some of the subsequent volumes were significantly more than that. 

 

It’s Valentine’s Day.  Should I rush out and buy a flower at, where?  Tops?  Do I really want to go out and shop this morning.  Making my way through a book of collection of Han and Six Dynasties poetry this morning I found a fragment that I thought to send to my wife.  They had conveniently left the Chinese in, and all of the characters were easy enough to find, except the yan that had the nvzi-pang before it. (嬿) My Mac’s built in Chinese dictionary was flummoxed.  https://www.mdbg.net/ , my go-to online dictionary was able to tell me that when you put a female radical in front of the character to describe the old territorial name for Beijing, Yanjing, you get . . . “beautiful.”

 

（苏武）

结发为夫妻，恩爱两不疑。

欢娱在今夕，嬿婉及良时。

 

 

 

Sunday, 02/14/21