Mist at Dawn (1968) by Zhang Daqian:
Phil Christman, with a wonderful description of teaching (I’ll be filing away the phrase “heresy of paraphrase” for later):
For teaching always does feel somewhat false, somewhat incomplete. In the classroom, I take things I love and adapt them. I abridge them. I simplify. I commit the heresy of paraphrase. I make comparisons and explanatory analogies at which specialists would wince. I make reading lists, which always leave somebody important out—whether I cut Thoreau to make room for Harriet Jacobs (a stunningly vivid and economical writer) or the other way around. I find the right level of oversimplification for my audience, I go directly to it, and then, by degrees, I retreat from it, inviting students to follow me into greater complexity. I never stop worrying that I have replaced my subject with a slightly stupider changeling. It just goes with the territory.
We are Americans; our national myth is Footloose. None of us can enjoy our pleasures till we think someone wants us not to have them.
If the phrase “meaning of a life” is analogous to the phrase “meaning of a word” or “meaning of a sentence,” then none of us have that much control over the meanings of our lives. Just as everything you say can be misheard or scrambled by differences in connotation or dialect, your presence in the world rarely says what you intend. You are a walking contradiction between aspiration and effect. The actual you orbits the intended you, the firm and defensible you, the serious you; or perhaps it’s the other way around. This is a quality you share with me, and with everyone, and that makes all of us that desperate and self-deluded and wholly compelling phenomenon: the bad movie.
Sunset pictures never come anywhere close to capturing the real thing. That fact doesn’t seem to deter me from trying.
Mom’s Christmas gift: reupholstering her old dining room chairs. Will update on progress, assuming there is some…
