Here's a vignette from Jonathan Spence's latest book, Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man (Viking, 2007), about the scholar Zhang Dai (1597-1680):
It was not just that the examinations themselves were perhaps not worth the fuss, expense and bother. It was also that at the heart of the scholarly life itself there often lurked a real element of futility. Strangely, Zhang Dai followed up this particular theme most carefully with the example of his own grandfather, whom at many levels he had clearly loved and respected, even revered. Yet, despite all his brilliance, grandfather—according to Zhang Dai—spent his last years of life in pursuit of a truly impossible vision, the compilation of an immense dictionary that would marshal all knowledge in composite categories based on a rhyme-scheme series of classifications. As Zhang Dai wrote in an essay aptly named “Rhyme Mountain,” right up to the end he rarely saw grandfather without a book in his hands, and piles of books lay in disorder all around his study, under layers of dust. When the sun was bright, grandfather took his books out of doors so he could read more easily. At dusk he lit candles and held his book right close to the flame, “leaning across the desk into the brightness.” Thus he would stay far into the night, showing no signs of tiredness. Claiming that all the previous dictionaries were inaccurate, grandfather determined to create his own, using the idea of mountains as his controlling metaphor of organization: key words were termed “high mountains,” catch phrases were “little mountains,” characters that had variant rhymes were termed “other mountains,” proverbs were classified as “worn-out moun tains” and so on. In this “Rhyme Mountain,” wrote Zhang, grandfather’s columns of little characters followed in tight columns “like the pleats in a skirt, on sheets of paper yellowed from the beat of the lamp”; he had filled, in this way, over three hundred notebooks, “each thick as bricks.” Some rhyme schemes might fill ten books or more.
One sad day, an old friend brought grandfather a section of a huge manuscript encyclopedia from the palace library in Beijing, proving to him that all of this had been done before, better organized and on a far larger scale. Sighing, grandfather said: “The number of books is without end, and I have been like a bird seeking to fill the sea with pebbles. What can be the point of it?” So he pushed aside his thirty years of work and never returned to his “Rhyme Mountain.” And even had grandfather finished the project, Zhang Dai wrote, “Who on earth would have published it?” There was nothing left of all that work across thirty years but a pile of writing brushes with the whiskers worn down to the wood” and “piles of paper useful only for sealing storage pots.”
pp. 74-75
Alan Baumler of Frog in a Well has two interesting posts on this book:
2 Comments
December 16, 2007 at 5:51 am
Zhang Dai’s pessimism about scholarly futility, when thrown against the wanton but very solid pleasures he took in life and the devastation of war that shattered them, looks even weightier. Spence translates with exquisite simplicity – 精衛 and her pebbles…
I found your website following a alum message board. The air is quite fresh around here.
December 16, 2007 at 6:48 am
Thanks Charlotte. I’m a regular reader of Alan’s learned and often funny contributions to Frog in a Well. Many professional historians think that Spence’s books are not “scholarly” enough and lack the scholarly apparatus historians expect of each other. I love Spence’s books because I think he’s a great writer. He’s one of a handful of historians whose works of history are also works of literature.