Studying Chinese, he once wrote, was "a liberation, like going for a swim on a hot day, for it got you entirely out of the prison of alphabetical words, and into the glittering crystalline world of ideographic characters."Winchester doesn't give a source for the quotation. The quotation also appears in Robert Finlay, "China, the West, and World History in Joseph Needham's 'Science and Civilisation in China'," Journal of World History 11.2 (Fall, 2000) 265-303 (at 271, n. 20), who cites as a source Lu Gwei-Djen, "The First Half-Life of Joseph Needham," in Explorations in the History of Science and Technology in China (Shanghai: Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House, 1982), pp. 1-36 (at 8), which I haven't seen.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, March 23, 2013
Liberation
Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved China (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 44 (on Joseph Needham):