Playing with antiquity

Since I'm morally depraved, I've been neglecting this blog in favor of other stuff, e.g. sickness, study, low-impact socialization, and sketchily reading Hannah Arendt in the Eslite bookstore, in between guilty, overpriced food court meals of vegetable protein and lemon ice. Yeah, I'm reading in English, making this a pretty manifest case of sin. Cheating on ICLP with the western canon, which only seems to interest me when my geographic position is emphatically non-western. Let's call it a sickbed indulgence. And anyway, Eslite has a much better collection of English-language monographs than my public library back home.

I'll write a legit blog entry some other day, but for now I thought I'd share a little slice of my everyday pursuit of rigor wrt the humanities. I'm taking a class called "Literary Chinese for Advanced Beginners", with this refreshingly old-school instructor who has us memorize particularly beautiful passages from the old sages. It's great for an absurd girl anachronism like me-- a means of indulging my recurring Confucian gentleman fantasy. Although I admit to taking a break from working on this to memorize some John Donne. I am so colonized. Batter my heart indeed.

This is a passage from Liezi, a vaguely Daoistic freethinker-type-- can't really claim to know too much about him, alas. The story's about this foolish old man who wanted to move a mountain, and how the purity of his faith and ambition eventually elevated him above the prudential consideration of an alleged wise man. It's also, as one of my classmates pointed out, weirdly into man's dominion over his environment, a position the western academy caricatures as incompatible with Chinese thought's general approach to nature. Whatever. I just like reciting things in bright red tights. And yeah, I know I look cray.