Practising British English

Please excuse the following, as it is an intentionally pretentious downer written to salvage my mood.

The water of the Dadu River, the sonorous flowing of which outside my window puts me to rest each evening, has risen considerably in the last week. The water has swallowed a number of large boulders, ingesting all but an impressionist's stroke of swirl and eddy.

In Kangding this weekend, Tenzin read to me a CNN Asia story about a pair of mudslides in Ganzi Prefecture, where we reside. Soon he discovered that rains along the swollen Dadu had caused the mudslides. In Shimian, a county a couple of hundred kilometers downriver,

rains caused a rock to tumble down a hillside and slam into a bus, knocking the vehicle off the road and killing nine people.

People have related stories to me before about encountering blood-soaked buses crushed by falling rocks. I've only witnessed such automotive fragility in its less natural form: leaving Chengdu a queue of bus passengers milled about looking dazed; a hundred yards away one the form of the driver hung twisted and exposed from the mangled chassis of his small car.

This evening due to a certain ennui and latent frustration I left my flat before the usual suspects from my class came to accompany me to a dinner of egg and tomato noodles in the canteen. I walked to Sunshine Island, a nearby restaurant, with Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls in my hand.

They served my beer cold in a fluted glass, which almost allowed me to ignore the derivative flavor of the hop-less rice appellation. I chuckled through passages, Gogol's humour carrying through (though certainly diminished) though it must have been impossibly difficult to translate. I am finding this satire to be a sarcastic respite, though it's strangely difficult to point to a specifically funny passage. The first of a trilogy to rival Dante's The Divine Comedy, Dead Souls held the place of Inferno. Gogol burned the text corresponding to Purgatory in a fit of insanity. Before he could write the companion to Paradise, he died in spiritual asceticism shouting, "A ladder! Quick, a ladder!"

The book has been my only cause to smile today, save the four Tibetan girls to whom I explained why we observe seasons. A volleyball represented the Sun, and a basketball the Earth, the bisecting black lines of which lent itself to a facile illustration of the way in which the Northern Hemisphere leans away from our star in winter.

As I ate fried potatoes and braised tofu (the final day of the Saka Dawa fast is Thursday), I beckoned to a black cat facing away from me. As it turned, I realized what I believed to be a child's toy in its mouth was indeed the soulless remains of a lizard. Small pink sacs bulged from beneath its tail. My students don't understand why Christians believe animals have no souls.

That image and a number of others--cacti budding among sheer cliffs, the warm dry wind of the valley, a crude stone edifice nearby concealing a pisser--coaxed my memory to dwell on New Mexican summers past, a sentimental trope to which my idle mind has resorted for the latter third of my life. Even as a child some remarked on the curious way that I stare at nothing when consumed by thought or fantasy or the mind's bare qualia (if such a thing were possible), dissociated from the stimuli of an observable world.

I do consider myself a patient man. Travelling for days on a bus or plane or train is not so terrible, and I've been known to forget to leave the house for days. Accordingly, the knowledge of everything that must be done before I finish teaching in five weeks has not so much made me anxious but has merely broken my will. I feel a little dishonest wishing to be in another place in the future, wasting my ever limited time and knowing that I will miss this place once gone.

If you have read this far, please accept my sincerest apologies. In truth I've been rather happy of late, though busy, perhaps you could say happily busy. I felt so bloody pleased with myself the other day that I reread Shelley's Ode to the West Wind and fitted it to my own fancy. I have also thought of seeing you again at the end of the summer, not with broken will, but with the pleasant satisfaction that we are yet too young to refuse the dares of our coy world.

There's always more to be said, but words are ghosts and we are not.