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A novel about my mother. Or for my mother? A book that moves as if making its way out of a series of concentric circles, starting at the core: family lexicon, home, everydayness, people, politics, history, natural history, geography, mythology, cosmology, geology. It slowly makes its way out. But toward what? What is the last concentric circle before it can no longer say anything about anything?

Some art historians say that an archaeological site is always a destruction site. Is that true? Do we have to destroy things in order to see them, sever things in order to know them? And what kind of knowing is that?

They watch “Trojan Woman” play by Seneca:

There is some violence between the Greek men and the Trojan women. But the violence is not shown onstage. It’s sometimes audible but always invisible. I want to be able to write a novel like that one day, a novel in which the violence of catastrophe, human or geological, is never visible but is maybe audible, and always just an undercurrent.

Where her sincerity once was she now feels only an acute moral ambivalence, and at heart she thinks she is right to feel it, because it is precisely here that she realises it is not she but other people who are steeped in pretence.

I am glad to find the one of the first ‘cuskian’ sentence in this book both in its form and in its content.

This imonologue has is not very different from Molly Bloom in Ulysses! Superb!

Outside my door
the dog barking
I know what it is
My lover’s here
Off with my stockings
down
parfumed stairs
My good-for-nothing lover
is drunk tonight
I help him into
my silk-curtained bed
Will he take off the silk gown?
O! O! not he
Milord is drunk let him be
Better that
than sleeping alone

By anonymous women poet (10th century).

Passionate. Spring has set.
Together for a moment. The night slants.
Echoes in the house; want to go up, dare not.
Glow behind the screen; wish to go through, cannot.
It would hurt too much, the swallow on a hairpin;
Truly shame me, the phoenix on a mirror.
On the road back, sunrise over Heng-tang.
The blossoming of the morning star shines farewell on the jewelled saddle.
By Li Shang-Yin tr. A.C. Graham

How strange that we should find in the conduct of a prostitute a degree of constancy rarely equalled even by the heroínes of history

This is from the short story by Po Hsing-Chien written sometime between 785-805 AD. (Tr by Arthur Waley). Not sure what there were writing on the subject in the West in this time. Seriously doubt such an advanced attitude.

why a return to prosperity often brings about a radicalization of the masses. This is because the relaxation of the demands of life makes possible a new arrangement of social space: horizons are no longer restricted to the most immediate of worries, there is some breathing space, and there is room for a new life project.

The Red Cockatoo
Sent as a present from Annam-
A red cockatoo.
Coloured like the peach-tree blossom,
Speaking with the speech of men.
And they did to it what is always done
To learned and eloquent.
They took a cage with stout bars
And shut it up inside.
By Po Chu-Yi

Thoughts on a Night Journey
Reeds by the bank bending, stirred by the breeze,
High-masted boat advancing alone in the night,
Stars drawn low by the vastness of the plain,
The moon rushing forward in the river’s flow.
How should I look for fame to what I have written?
I age of sickness, how continue to serve?
Wandering, drifting, what can I take for likeness?
-A full that wheels alone between earth and sky.
Tu Fu

Each present that happens drives into time like a wedge and lays a claim to eternity. Eternity is not a separate order beyond time. It is the atmosphere of time.

Bodily movement can only play a role in the perception of the world if it is itself an original intentionality, a manner of being related to the object that is distinct from knowledge. The world must not exist around us as a system of objects whose synthesis we perform, but rather as an open ensemble of things towards which we project ourselves.

I can only escape from being into more being; for example, I escape from society into nature, or from the real world into an imaginary that is made up of the debris of the real.

Even the publishers themselves couldn’t be bothered to read the books they published and instead reached for classics.

..novelsnow must move as smoothly as possible; there could bno friction.Names,places,culture&history must be removed in the name of soft edges,in order 2speed the reader along.The goal was4these books 2bsold in as many cities as possible in as many languages as possible.Consequently, everything that made our world distinct had 2b subtracted,wiped clean.Rendered like this,the stories told acquired a lazy universality.

To perceive is suddenly to commit to an entire future of experiences in a present that never, strictly speaking, guarantees that future; to perceive is to believe in a world.

If we want to take the phenomenon of movement seriously, we must imagine a world that is not merely made up of things, but also of pure transitions.

2/2 All knowledge is established within the horizons opened up by perception. Since perception is the “flaw" in this "great diamond," there can be no question of describing it as one of the facts that happens in the world, for the picture of the world will always include this lacuna that we are and by which the world
itself comes to exist for someone.

1/2 If we believe in the word past in the physical world in stimuli and in the organism such as it is represented by textbooks this is first of all because we have a present and real perceptual field, a surface of contact with the world or a perpetual rooting in it; it is because the world ceaselessly bombards and besieges subjectivity just as waves surround a shipwreck on the beach.

The well-known legend of Li Po death, in 762, is that he fell drunk from a boat while trying to grasp the reflection of the moon, and was drowned. It might even be true, particularly as death from pneumonia seems to have been described as ‘drowning’. It is indeed always difficult to separate fact and fiction about his life; a few further details of which will emerge in the remarks on his poems.

To understand is to experience the accord between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the realisation- and the body is our anchorage in a world.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to sense, and there is nothing we can do or say that does not acquire a name in history.

Thus the permanence of one’s body if classical psychology has analysed it could have directed it toward the body no longer as an object of the world but rather as our means of communication with it, or could have directed it toward the world, no longer as sum of determinate objects but rather as a latent horizon of our experience, itself ceaselessly present prior to all determining thought.

she discovered her new husband had falsified his qualifications in order to obtain an official post. she revealed this fact to the authorities. Since traditional Confucian ethics held that a wife should always be subservient to her husband, Li Qingzhao was sentenced to 2 years in prison for violating this code. Fortunately, she was released after 9 days through the intervention of one of her 1sr husband's relatives

I recognised her way of walking, as if nothing were weighing her down, neither her body nor time nor that thing we all accumulate the way you accumulate old bits of junk in a cupboard you never open.

Zhuangzi and Huizi were walking on the bank beside the Hao river. Zhuangzi said, "Look at the little fish swimming as they please. That is what fish enjoy!" Huizi said, "You are not a fish.How do you know what they enjoy?" Zhuangzi said, "You are not i, how do you know I don't know what fish enjoy?" (Cont in the comment)

The Book of Songs, as the only work of literature mentioned by Confucius, was to become one of the "Five Classics, adopted during the carly Han period as the basis, for education for a millennium.
The Five Classics (Wu jing) are:
Book of Songs,
Book of Changes (Ti jing),
Book of Documents (or History) (Shu jing),
Book of Rites (or Ritual) (Li ji),
Spring and Autumn Annals (Chun giu)