Reading in the night

It’s early, too early again. I don’t sleep as I used to. But, at least this awakening offers dry cheeks. I listen for a while to the sound of his slumber. That can be noisy at times, too noisy to return to sleep myself. Regardless, I am awake. And thinking.

Knowing too well that I had best engage my mind or thoughts will take me to bad places, I pick it up again, the book Julian introduced me to: The Oracle Bones by Peter Hessner. What a gift, sparked by a street-side conversation that revealed a mutual interest in discovery, in learning. What a treasure. A work that blends fact and fiction and lived experience is right up my alley. It’s what I aspire to and sometimes reach when those demons of self-censorship can be kept at bay

I love a book that invites thought and reflection. I think this one would do so for most people but I have no doubt that my years among the Chinese inform my appreciation of this work. Among the Chinese. What a phrase. As if such a vast and storied people can be reduce in that way. Yet, at this point in the book, I note that order, regularity, organization is a touch note through history, and like Hessner’s observation that it is not the hero worship that characterizes the myths and underpinning ethos of the west, but the continuity in competence, in character oriented toward well managed effort, that emerges.

As I write that, I realize that well structured is a more accurate phrasing, as well managed presumes effective, “good” outcomes. Certainly, there are plenty of examples of disastrous outcomes delivered through determined procedure and the intertia that keeps that rolling, blind to the possibility of innovation. Historically, there has been plenty of Chinese innovation. But during some other 3:00 a.m. ponderance, I must reflect on how order, regularity and organization receive and incorporate innovation, and how this compares to the brash, ready for war (or at least conflict) of the western hero who innovates for dominance, rather than effectiveness.

That is for another night. Just before dawn, I grow weary. The sounds that kept me awake earlier now have me yearning for an embrace thirty years in the making.