necessary maintenance, and when the
water is hot on a chilly, stormy day its drinking satisfies in a deeply,
perhaps atavistic, manner. Drinking hot water on such days has calmed the
spirits of a million generations of our ancestors in their caves and dark
lodges. Drinking hot water can be a kind of communion with them, and with the
spirit of simple survival in a hostile world. I also find studying Chinese to
be a deeply satisfying experience. I am afraid that people nowadays have forgotten
that learning, by itself, can be gratifying.
So, as rain tapped on my roof and I
drank steaming hot water from my mug in this drenched little corner of the
forest I wandered into the psychology of Chinese people as manifested by how
their written language has evolved. The Chinese character for "good"
consists of the symbol for "woman" next to the symbol for
"child." How can you but be impressed by a culture that expresses
itself in such a simple but profound manner? And what pleasure it is for the
mind to be reminded on such a morning as Saturday's that the Chinese character
for "fragrant" is nothing less than the symbol for "grain,"
such as wheat, set with the symbol for "sun."
Thus -- the sun warming a field of
wheat produces a fragrance. The glow caused by these insights harmonizes
beautifully with the glow brought by steaming water on a rainy morning.
*****
"HOW PRETTY HE WAS... "
My cousin Miles Carroll writes
"This week I found a crippled finch. I put him on top of my shed and
watched him. By the afternoon he was dead, and I sure hated to see him go after
holding him and seeing how pretty he was."
That reminds me of once when I had
access to a microscope and I spent a whole morning gazing into a single drop of
pond water. I watched one-celled Amoebas and Paramecia migrating majestically
through transparent, sunlight-charged water. I watched Hydras somersaulting
across the slide surface, and there were wiggling green Euglenas with whiplike
tails, and long strands of Spirogyra alga inside which strands of chloroplasts
elegantly spiraled.
At the end of the session I
straightened up my creaky spine, withdrew the slide from beneath the microscope
and... then what?
I had become an admirer of the
myriad little beings in that drop of water. Could I just wipe the slide on my
sleeve and ignore the consequent genocide? I ended up carrying the droplet back
to the pond from which it came, the theory being that my heart having been
opened to these little beings counted for something.