Intersecting with Eternity
宇宙之大，蒼蠅之微，皆可取材
Intersecting with Eternity is a mini-anthology of literary and artistic works, both past and present, that form part of an unbroken stream of human awareness and poetic self-reflection. It is a companion to The Tower of Reading and an extension of The Other China section of China Heritage.
The title ‘intersecting with eternity’ is inspired by a passage in Mary Norris’s excursions into the world of Ancient Greece:
… the real world of crabby landladies and deceptive road signs would crack open and mythology would spill out. You have to pay the rent in the real world, but it’s crazy not to embrace those moments when it intersects with eternity.
— Mary Norris, Greek to Me: adventures of a comma queen, 2019
The Chinese tagline of this chapter — 宇宙之大，蒼蠅之微，皆可取材 — was famously used in the early 1930s by Lin Yutang when he championed the personal essay 小品文 as a vehicle for individualistic expression. Decried by polemicists and cultural militants, Lin’s humanistic temper has been embattled ever since.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
1 August 2025
A Considerable Speck
Robert Frost
A speck that would have been beneath my sight
On any but a paper sheet so white
Set off across what I had written there.
And I had idly poised my pen in air
To stop it with a period of ink
When something strange about it made me think,
This was no dust speck by my breathing blown,
But unmistakably a living mite
With inclinations it could call its own.
It paused as with suspicion of my pen,
And then came racing wildly on again
To where my manuscript was not yet dry;
Then paused again and either drank or smelt –
With loathing, for again it turned to fly.
Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.
It seemed too tiny to have room for feet,
Yet must have had a set of them complete
To express how much it didn’t want to die.
It ran with terror and with cunning crept.
It faltered: I could see it hesitate;
Then in the middle of the open sheet
Cower down in desperation to accept
Whatever I accorded it of fate.
I have none of the tenderer-than-thou
Collectivistic regimenting love
With which the modern world is being swept.
But this poor microscopic item now!
Since it was nothing I knew evil of
I let it lie there till I hope it slept.
I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.
***
- Robert Frost, A Considerable Speck, The Atlantic, June 1939
I remember [Jonathan] Miller asking [Christopher] Hitchens if he knew the Robert Frost poem “A Considerable Speck.” Surprisingly, Hitchens didn’t. Miller then recited the entire poem word for word. Even Hitchens was impressed. “A Considerable Speck” is about a writer observing a tiny insect crawling across his white page and his sudden awareness of this microscopic creature’s significance.
Frost’s poem struck a chord with Miller. He’d often stated that the importance of the seemingly insignificant was the basis of his work as a physician and a director: “The more you concentrate on the negligible, the more you end up with the grand.”
— Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything, Simon & Schuster, 2025, p.179
***
