patrick

Ok, I’m through the first hundred pages, and I feel hooked with the desire to follow this story or these people or something.  So we start with this person of recognition named Joseph Noel Needham.  His life is of extraordinary character; including his blessed British stock of privilege and society.  And for some reason I tend to expect so much more from someone starting with so much privilege that the first bits of this chapter entitled, “The Barbarian and The Celestial” in The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester, had left me unenthusiastic about finishing.

But finally after 38 pages of this guy being kinda your run of the mill intellectual elitists I got introduced to a word that I had never read before.  Gymnosophy:  Practicing nudism.  Here is a choice quote on the subject:

Nudism soon be come tolerated to a limted degree in the ancient universities, where most eccentric behavoior was excused, just as long as it didn’t fighten the horses (p 38)

And yet Needham liked “a little more privacy”? (p 39)  A private nudist?  Aren’t we all private nudists to some extent?

And on that note, a biochemical seraglio? (p 40)  Really?  You are going with that?  I suppose I do understand that some labs, or at least some people in some labs, are hyper-sexual.

But this is a gem to be treasured,  ”The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on.”  (p 55)

I enjoyed the slow moving romantic Western love story with Δ aka Dorothy and Joseph.  The inequity of their relationship is (to use a favorite freshman word) juxtaposed to that of Wang and O-lan from The Good Earth, the the book and the 1937 movie which we read and watched respectively.  This does not include the great 1986 The Feelies album named “The Good Earth”, which I do recommend as well as the book.

I also love the moment the author reconstructs what Joseph was doing by reconstituting his custom hand-written English to Chinese dictionary.  I knew that with the addition of Lu Gwei-Djen to the story that ”apologize” or “sorry” would make the first draft. (p 68)

Another thing that really struck me is that China managed to keep one written language for thousands of years.  We get a hold of it and have dozens of diversely inscribed versions from pin-yin to whatever the author could make up.

Sources:

Winchester, S. (2008). The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom. New York: Harper.