After I have had something to drink and my ears are beginning to burn, I gaze up at the sky and, thumping on a crock to keep time, I give a great "ya-a!" and sing this song:
I sowed the southern hillAt such times I flap my robes in delight, waves my sleeves up and down, stamp my feet, and dance about. Indeed it is a wild and unconventional way to behave, and yet I cannot say that I see anything wrong with it.
But I could not keep back the weeds.
I planted an acre of beans
But they fell off the vine, leaving empty stems.
Man's life should be spent in joy.
Why wait in vain for wealth and honor?
"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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Monday, September 02, 2013
Nothing Wrong With It
Yang Yün (1st century B.C.), letter to Sun Hui-tsung, in Han Shu, chapter 66, tr. Burton Watson, Early Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 118 (footnote omitted):