If you have not yet reached a comprehensive and thorough understanding of things in learning, then you are likely to say yes to those who agree with you, and say no to those who don't. It is like a southerner in a boat sneering at a northerner in a carriage, or the long-legged crane spurning the short-legged duck. Not to reprove yourself for holding a prejudice, but to reprove others for holding a different opinion—isn't that preposterous?
"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).
Pages
▼
Sunday, May 15, 2022
Preposterous
Yüan Tsung-tao (1560–1600), in Vignettes from the Late Ming: A Hsiao-p'in Anthology. Translated with Annotations and an Introduction by Yang Ye (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), p. 44 (notes omitted):