Other People’s Thoughts is a section in the Journal of the China Heritage site. It is inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.
Pierre remarked that the resulting modest volume of quotations was ‘idiosyncratically compiled for the amusement of idle readers’ (see Simon Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, 2007). Our aim is similar: to amuse our readers (idle or otherwise); as is our modus operandi: to build up an idiosyncratic compilation, one that reflects the interests of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology and its coterie.
In collecting this material, and by adding to it over time, we accord also with a Chinese literary practice in which quotations — sometimes called yǔlù 語錄, literally ‘recorded sayings’ — have a particular history, and a powerful resonance.
The most famous collection of recorded sayings is The Analects 論語, compiled by disciples of Confucius. Then there is the timeless 5000-words of Laozi’s The Tao and the Power 道德經, as well as the Chan/Zen 禪宗 tradition of what in English are known by the Japanese term kōan 公案, dating from the Tang dynasty. Modern imitations range from the political bon mots of Mao Zedong to excerpts from the prolix prose of Xi Jinping’s tireless speech writers, and published snippets from arm-chair philosophers and motivational speakers.
Other People’s Thoughts also finds inspiration in the ‘poetry talks’ 詩話, ‘casual jottings’ 筆記 and ‘marginalia’ 眉批 of China’s literary tradition.
— Geremie R. Barmé,
Editor, China Heritage
29 June 2024
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Other People’s Thoughts I-XLV:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, XLVI
In a Chinese jail
In the darkest hour of your life, the lights are always on. That’s the fucking irony.
— Cheng Lei 成蕾, former jailed journalist
相濡以沫
As they look out suspiciously at the US allies in their regions, Russia and China see each other as relatively reliable neighbours. They share a long border. So maintaining friendly relations is regarded as critical by both countries, to foil “dual containment” by the US and its allies. Viewed from Beijing, the defeat of Russia would risk leaving China dangerously isolated. As one Chinese diplomat puts it, sardonically, America’s proposition to Beijing could be summarised as: “Please help us to defeat your closest ally, so that we can turn on you next.” In a similar way, Putin knows that Chinese support is completely indispensable to the Russian war effort in Ukraine. This mutual reliance means that Moscow and Beijing will remain bound together, whatever the underlying tensions in their relationship.
— Gideon Rachman, The relationship between Xi and Putin is built to last, Financial Times, 19 May 2024
Cruising
Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad. …
It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.
— Gary Shteyngart, Crying Myself to Sleep on the Icon of the Seas, The Atlantic, May 2024
Why Chinese Is Boring
When culture is forced to conform to the taste & ideological predilections of a 70 year-old who pulls his pants up too high, it’s not going to be attractive to young NZers. Japanese is still more popular in NZ because they keep their silly politics out of their pop culture.
— Catherine Churchman, Why is Chinese so boring?
Vale Benjamin Lim
In our first meeting, upon sincere compliments about his impressive career, Ben responded if Chinese journalists at Chinese media were empowered to do their job fully, “I would have been out of my job.” I took it as his trademark modesty, but was instantly heartened by his empathy with the realities and struggles of his Chinese counterparts.
— Zichen Wang, Pekingnology, 22 May 2024
Britain Goes to the Polls
Suddenly it was here. They knew the day would come. They knew that eventually it would arrive. Well now that day was upon them, and irrational as it was, they blamed him for it. The void beckoned. It ushered them in, and from its depths you could hear terrible lament of lost souls.
— Ian Dunt, Election 2024: This wasn’t a campaign announcement. It was a death rattle, 23 May 2024
Michael Gove’s surface veneer of respectability
He truly was an impressive member of Cabinet, with decent principles and a commendable manner. And he truly was a man who would justify anything, who had no moral floor. He acted consistently to destroy that which was calm and responsible about British conservatism and turn it into the Frankenstein’s Monster we see today. He is the living embodiment of how a Burkean philosophy can disintegrate from the inside, leaving only a surface veneer of respectability to conceal a snarling inner temperament. All smiles and handshakes, followed by the flashing of knives.
— Ian Dunt, A Political Obituary for Michael Gove, 25 May 2024
Pye in Your Face
Nigel Farage is Liz Truss in human form.
Contra liberalism
The vociferous critics of liberalism are like passengers on the Titanic who root for the iceberg. After all, an iceberg is thrilling, and anyway the White Star Line has classes, and the music the band plays is second-rate, and why is the food French instead of honestly English? “Just as I told you, the age of the steamship is over!” they cry as the water slips over their shoes. They imagine that another boat will miraculously appear—where all will be in first class, the food will be authentic, and the band will perform only Mozart or Motown, depending on your wishes. Meanwhile, the ship goes down. At least the band will be playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which they will take as some vindication. The rest of us may drown.
— Adam Gopnik, Why Liberals Struggle to Defend Liberalism, The New Yorker, 27 May 2024
Four Kings
Bert looks like if the Tiger King and the Liver King only ate liver that looked like Martin Luther King after he got beat up by Rodney King.
— Tony Hinchcliffe
The Democracy of the Dead
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
— G.K. Chesterton
Paglia Redux
Paglia gives us proof that you can make a sophisticated, original point without resorting to academic Esperanto. In its search for pagan archetypes, Sexual Personae spans centuries of apparently continuous art and literature, from the Aeneid (a ‘closet drama’) to Emily Dickinson (an ‘autoerotic sadist’). The wit may date back to a McCarthyan midcentury, but the book’s breadth is unmistakably a hangover from the New Age upheaval of the late 1960s, which the author experienced first-hand as a young woman. ‘Today’s academic leftists are… timorous nerds who missed the Sixties while they were grade-grubbing in the library,’ she says in her essay Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders. Her work is as defiantly multicultural as George Harrison playing the sitar, and is littered with telltale preoccupations of psychedelia, like Aubrey Beardsley and the ancient cults of Dionysus.
This signature Sixties-ness may be a clue to her resurgence. My generation occupies what often seems to be the exact inverse of the Summer of Love. We are theoretically connected to people all over the world, but secluded – through both algorithms and the narrow language-games of academia – from any New Age-y width of thought or belief. When you spend lots of time immobile on the internet, you’re shut off from an awareness of your own body – it’s not uncommon to see young people calling themselves ‘brains in meat suits’, or occupants of a ‘flesh prison’. We are having less sex than those before us, and we cover our eyes when there’s nudity on TV. All of this might explain a collective aversion to the Boomers, who were born between 1946 and 1964 and got to stomp around happily in the hallucinogenic debris of the Sexual Revolution. But it also explains why ideas like Paglia’s feel, to us, as potent as psychedelic drugs.
— Ella Dorn, The cult of Camille Paglia, The Spectator, 5 April 2024
Guilty As Hell
Guilty as charged.
Guilty.
Guilty as charged.
Guilty as hell.
Guilty as sin.
Guilty on EVERY DAMN CHARGE.A jury of Donald Trump’s peers in New York City just delivered a stunning verdict in the election fraud Stormy Daniels payoff conspiracy case. (God knows what to call it; it’s like a crime gumbo.) …
Make no mistake, Trump remains one of the most successful criminals in American history, the architect and beneficiary of a bewildering constellation of scams, grifts, con games, bust-outs, rip-offs, and flim-flams. His entire life is one long lie, one long trick against the people who bought in to his garbage-tier projects, gimcrack branding schemes, and mid-tier golf courses for aspiring middle managers.
— Rick Wilson, The Verdict: Guilty As Hell, Substack, 30 May 2024
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
— Jalaluddin Rumi, from Rumi: Selected Poems, trans Coleman Barks with John Moynce, A. J. Arberry and Reynold Nicholson, Penguin Books, 2004
The past is not the present
Events around us undoubtedly sensitize us to what seem to be similar situations in the past—they add a sense of weight and human urgency to what we read. But that is all. The historian’s job is about the past, and especially about how and why the past is not the present. People in history are usually most interesting to us when they are not like us. Like good friends they complement us rather than act as clones of ourselves. The past has an integrity of its own, and historical knowledge can best serve the present by preserving this integrity, not least by widening the imagination and by insisting on the complexity of historical change.
To take an example: when people tell me that the negative changes of our own time are similar to those that led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire—as if the one was a distant mirror of the other—I notice that the changes which they tend to isolate have little to do with the Roman Empire as it really was, and a lot to do with what they dislike in their own society. …
Each age produces its own historians with their own ways of asserting the truth. Perhaps the most urgent need we have today is to develop a sense of the strangeness of the past and a sense of urgent searching for the truth to ensure that the past is not forgotten, or flattened by being presented as so “like us”—no more than a mirror of ourselves—that it can be manipulated without challenge.
— Peter Brown, A Past in All Its Fullness, The New York Review of Books, 1 June 2024
七絕·有感時局四首
共黨黃俄打劫中，
邪奸暴虐貪成風。
民生凋敝多煩惱，
百姓黎民兩手空。
風雨飄搖崩潰中，
亂象紛紛各不同。
山崩水患尋常事，
自盡貪官撲撲隆。
死後原非萬事空，
但因罪孽皆不同。
天理昭昭分善惡，
報應源頭是乃翁。
時局紛爭結局中，
心燈點亮現長虹。
以詩言志評時局，
莫讓惡黨再行凶。
— 陳大民，2024年6月26日
William Blake’s Antisemitism
To me who believe the Bible & profess myself a Christian a defence of the Wickedness of the Israelites in murdering so many thousands under pretence of a command from God is altogether Abominable & Blasphemous. Wherefore did Christ come was it not to abolish the Jewish Imposture. Was not Christ murderd because he taught that God loved all Men & was their father & forbad all contention for Worldly prosperity in opposition to the Jewish Scriptures which are only an Example of the wickedness & deceit of the Jews & were written as an Example of the possibility of Human Beastliness in all its branches.
Christ died as an Unbeliever. … That the Jews assumed a right Exclusively to the benefits
of God will be a lasting witness against them & the same will it be against Christians.The Bible or Word of God, Exclusive of Conscience or the Word of God Universal, is that Abomination which like the Jewish ceremonies is for ever removed & henceforth every man may converse with God & be a King & Priest in his own house.
— from William Blake, ‘Annotations to An Apology for the Bible by R. Watson, Bishop of Landaff, London 1797’ in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman; commentary by Harold Bloom, new revised edition, New York: Anchor Books, 1988, pp. 614-615
Trump Jumps the Shark
So I said, let me ask you a question and he said, nobody ever asked this question and it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT. Very smart. He goes, I say, what would happen if the boat sank from its weight? And you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there, by the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, do you notice that a lot of shark? I watched some guys justifying it today. Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were, they were not hungry, but they misunderstood what who she was? These people are. He said there’s no problem with sharks. They just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming now. It really got decimated and other people do a lot of shark attacks. So I said, so there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards or here, do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking? Water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because I will tell you he didn’t know the answer. He said, you know, nobody’s ever asked me that question. I said, I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water. But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every single time
— Huffpost, 12 June 2024
Why I Write
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
— George Orwell, Why I Write, 1946
On Writing
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
王朔評白岩松
自以為是的真誠，卻是骨子裡的做作。永遠緊鎖眉頭扮演社會良心，恰到好處的以貌似旁觀者的身份，說出一些令人拍案叫絕的觀點，只乾些添磚加瓦的活，內在的本質，他打死也不說。他的行為是跪舔，但姿勢上卻拿捏的相當有自尊！
Going, going …
Hong Kong, once a vibrant and politically diverse community is slowly becoming a totalitarian state. The rule of law is profoundly compromised in any area about which the government feels strongly.
I was an overseas judge of the Court of Final Appeal until my resignation last week. I remained on the court in the hope that the presence of overseas judges would help sustain the rule of law. I fear that this is no longer realistic. Others are less pessimistic. I hope that they are proved right.
— Jonathan Simpson, The rule of law in Hong Kong is in grave danger, Financial Times, 10 April 2024
Trumphadis & the Hannibal Lector of the GOP
Donald Trump is a man only in the loosest of terms. Ponder his soft, coddled life, his dedication to makeup, haircare, and decadent luxury, to say nothing of his lack of any of the traditional manly virtues of integrity, honesty, honor, strength, or courage.
He loves to display a ferocious, grotesquely exaggerated form of dominance in one area of life: humiliating the people he holds in thrall.
Yesterday, Trump visited Capitol Hill — yes, the same Capitol Hill that three years ago was under attack by his yokel army — to demand the public fealty of every Republican with a sense of self-preservation. It went about as well as you might imagine.
“Like talking to your drunk uncle at the family reunion” was one of the more generous assessments of Diaper Donnie’s visit. Like a serial killer holding his captives in a dank basement in a decaying mansion, Trump, the Hannibal Lecter to the James Gumbs of the GOP, demanded they kiss his ass with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
Between 75-100 of the GOP caucus are genuine Trumphadis, true believers in election denial, and who would readily send their teenage daughters to serve in Trump’s Mar-A-Lago sex dungeon if he asked. (“Is there a sex dungeon at Mar-a-Lago?” you ask. Well, there is now.)
The rest are Trump-centric, absolute opportunists or terrified mice. But they all bend the knee, even Mitch McConnell, who hates Trump with a fiery passion. None of them has the moral courage to stand in the caucus and tell him what they believe. …
— Rick Wilson, The Friday Brief: The Big Picture, Substack, 13 June 2024
Cricket USA
Some would argue this team doesn’t reflect American cricket prowess, since virtually none of the talent was developed by a grassroots cricket system. Others would argue a team of guys with accents and melanin doesn’t reflect America at all.
Well guess what, melting pot haters: this is what we do. I’m a first-generation American and it is my god-given right to cheer for an bunch of people who look nothing like me playing a sport I only kinda understand, and if you don’t like it you can move to a country that sucks at cricket, unlike America. Don’t let Lady Liberty hit you on the way out.
— Roger Sherman, An American’s Guide To Team USA’s cricket win over Pakistan, Substack, 7 June 2024
Writing about what you don’t know
The worst piece of advice anyone can give a writer is to write about what they know. Who wants to do something so limiting? One of the reasons I write is because I want to explore the lives of other people. I find it both interesting and challenging to write about what I don’t know and to use my writing to learn about a subject, to understand it and to represent it as authentically as possible in order to help others make sense of it too.
— from the Afterword, John Boyne, My Brother’s Name is Jessica, Puffin, 2019
An Ever-turning Worm
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.
— Isaac Asimov
A Poet’s Hope
A poet’s hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but values elsewhere.
— W.H. Auden
Assange on Injustice
Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice.
If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to fritter these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find.
If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whose hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes.
The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering.
Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.
— Julian Assange, 3 January 2007
Trump vs. Satan
I can’t believe people are comparing Trump to Satan. Yes, he’s evil, but he’s certainly not as evil as Trump.
— Ice T, 2020
Trump vs. Biden: the Infirm vs. the Unstable
Is this how democracy dies, in a shouting match between two seniors about their golf game?
— Susan B. Glasser, Was the Debate the Beginning of the End of Joe Biden’s Presidency?, The New Yorker, 28 June 2024