Last night we made a second attempt to move back into our bedroom, but the heat drove us back out to the living-room AC by 1 AM. Even then I had a hard time getting to sleep because it took so long for me and the room to cool down again. I lay in a half-doze with my eyes closed and my back toward the window. The blinds were down and closed. And even so, I saw the lightning flash. Was that lightning? I wondered with my eyes still closed. Then a loud clap of thunder startled Colin awake so he half sat up. "Don't worry, it was just lightning," I said. "I saw it with my eyes closed."
It rained hard all morning. The weather report warned of training storms. This turns out not to mean storms to keep you in practice for anything, but rather a reasonably unusual weather phenomenon in which clouds behave like a train. According to internet wisdom (always potentially doubtful, but in this case it seems reasonable): "Usually bands of rain stretch north and south and travel eastwards. In a training effect the rain bands travel north or south so you would get the whole length of the rain band instead of a small part of it." The total rainfall added up to more than an inch, according to Weatherbug. Colin ventured out to the Caribou Coffeeshop a few blocks away (Intelligentsia is cooler, but Caribou is so darned close) to get some work done but I stayed home and made a lot of progress on my dissertation chapter.
It's funny how I've felt like I've been spending ages muddling around, reading this and reading that, all without any of my research adding up to writeable results. Then all of sudden, it starts to come together. I still have to read some more stuff (it looks like maybe another trip to U of C tomorrow--this time in the car!) but I now have twelve pages of what looks like chapter 2, Western Han reception history of Sima Qian's Shiji.
Today I worked on the melancholy story of Sima Qian's grandson, the son of his daughter, and probably one of the earliest readers of the Shiji. For a time he had a high position at court but was later deprived of his titles due to infighting. As a commoner he proceeded to make a lot of money and live a life of pleasure and dissipation. He was very talented, and a brilliant writer, and when a friend reproached him for his lifestyle he wrote in response a bitingly sarcastic letter that has been preserved and remains today as evidence of what a difficult and clever person he must have been. But when his enemies at court accused of him of causing a solar eclipse by his arrogance, the emperor had his case investigated, at which point the later came to light. The emperor read it and found it abhorrent. The fellow was executed by being cut in half at the waist. Maybe his arrogance caused the eclipse after all. (Note that since the emperor was astrologically identified with the sun, a solar eclipse was considered a serious disaster/warning sign.)
And for an example of Chinese law today, how about this article? Bullying a blind lawyer and defending its right to force sterilization and late-term abortions upon unwilling would-be mothers--way to go Chinese legal system. Looking great in the eyes of the world.
I fear this may be bad news for those of my future FB colleagues who are putting such high hopes in China's progress toward, and generally positive attitude about, rule of law....
Thankfully, I am just a peruser of ancient tomes and don't have to get depressed about things like this. Instead, it's something to be viewed in the context of the great unfolding pattern of history. Maybe it will develop into a turning point, or maybe it will be just a flash in the pan. But it's good to see that for once the issue is a really worthwhile one, touching on the real heart of the problem. Well, probably I shouldn't say more in the public forum, but, this is just to opine that it's a story worth following.
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