The moving finger writes

…and having writ, moves on. Ah, but not so graciously. Our winter vacation has officially come to an end in northeast China with the official advent of spring, and we thought our writing came to an end as well. Yet, the rain in Spain is no longer just in the plain, Tennessee’s tornadoes and torrential rains are terribly getting out of hand, the sandstorms of the steppe in our Saharan Asia are blinding the unfolded eyelids of Mongolians, but the green in spring sprouting in Liaoning is not doing so on cue.

Just when we thought that the Chinese calendar might know something we didn’t, in that as soon as students started arriving on campus for spring semester (Western calendars make that turn on March 19), the sun came out resplendent and warm, melting all the remaining snow on the ground. The boys, with raucous voices and cutoffs—already into March Madness and oblivious to the Siberian winds—started frolicking under the basketball hoops like it was summertime play. Someone started playing with the heavenly switches. We joined the rest of the world wondering what Moqin (mother) nature was up to.

We woke up in the middle of the week with a fresh blanket of 4-inch snow on the ground, a whole day of winter fog, with temperatures plunging 15 degrees south in the early morn, ascending into heights of similar distance midday, and then nose-diving back to the freezer at sundown. Those of us of with labored respiratory constitution and weakened-knee condition, particularly the aging elders to which I now count myself, sought comfort under the covers.

That, or wrap the woolen blanket around the shoulder, stay close to the radiator, drag the cramping hind thigh into any sun rays that filter through the window, and hack our thoughts on the LCD just one more time.

We were in the Nippongo world of solemn 3.11 anniversary observance the other day and since I alluded to the twin towers of NYC’s own 9.11, a colleague reminded me to add just one more memorable eleven, the 26.11 in India in 2008 when a city came under high-profile suicidal attacks in what is now known as the Massacre of Mumbai. Ah, but the scent of death permeates the air.

Our title and opening line comes from Edward Fitzgerald’s 19th century rendering of the ancient Persian mathematician and poet’s quatrains titled the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Fitzgerald is often accused of taking liberties with his translation of the 11th century Persian lines but his renditions flow like Caribbean molasses on a summer day. We still savor our long-ago quoting of lines livening up many youthful downing and drowning into the cup and brew, even after our lips no longer recall the soft sidling of adoring freshie LitMajors at the Student Union.

We remember Omar Khayyam’s alleged stoicism and poetic statements of the objective irreversible movements of time and events, as we muse over the indeterminate nature of natural and human-induced disasters in our surroundings and internal consciousness, yet we dare to celebrate our day even as we now take federal effort to bend and lace our shoes. Old age does not take too kindly to the receding sunset of our years, but the sun, nonetheless, still shines in its decline.

Down the hall from us here at the Shenyang Aerospace University is an Irani PhD student working on finding ways to keep the burning of coal clean (an oxymoron by definition since coal burning is never clean!) but he is hardly known for his major study. He is often asked his views on the use of nuclear fission in Iran that is now the object of Western schizomania. A U.S. general was recently quoted as suggesting that Iran would be a perfect target for the United States to test its weapons, even if it means obliterating the whole civilization from the surface of the Earth!

This civilization that hosted caravans on the Silk Road, who first gave the people east of them the designation as “the people of the Qin (Chin)” which Marco Polo popularized in Europe and the French labeling them “Chine,” thus our current designation of “China”; these folks who gave us Zoroaster and the humble image of the three Magi at the lowly manger, has become the object of our vilification because they bother to ensure their energy supply beyond the gush of oil that (starting with the British empire, momentarily derailed in the disgrace of the last Shah and surreptitiously still flowed in our pipelines) we have exploited to light up our night skies and power our combustion engines.

With eternal gratitude for the gifts of the Judeo-Christian wisdom of my upbringing, we feign no admiration to hawkish Israel’s brandishing its hypocrisy with its own stowed uranium-laced thunder, decrying the access of a technology it had long harbored and used to blackmail its way into muscling Gaza and the West Bank, abetted by the prejudice of people who find discomfort from folks who call their supreme allegiance, “Allah”! Puhleeeze!

Still, the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on. In the winter that is breaking into spring, the laughter of youth and the bright searching eyes of innocence nosing its way to the Holy Grail of knowledge and the illusory assurances of onionskin diplomas, as the world turns, we do, indeed, move on.
Singularly, we do so with only one concern: How shall the future generation live?