Laura Spinney on the spread of Proto-Indo-European The post Lingua Obscura appeared first on The American Scholar.

My newly graduated youngest son is visiting Thailand with friends from his alma mater, Rice University. Most of the photos he has sent document meals eaten and temples visited, but among them is this one, my favorite image:  The smiling head of the Buddha sunk among the tangled roots of a banyan tree. The place is Wat Mahathat in Ayutthaya, former capital of Siam and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991. Founded in 1350, the city was destroyed by the Burmese in 1767 and today is known as Thailand’s Angkor Wat. It was abandoned until the 1950s.   I had seen the banyan/Buddha image once before, in black and white, accompanying a series of poems by the late Kenneth Fields, collectively titled “One Love,” a sort of travelogue documenting a visit to Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. Fields was a student of Yvor Winters at Stanford University, and co-edited with him a poetry collection, Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969). Fields doesn’t mention the Buddha head explicitly:   “Sacred figures draped in yellow Bas-reliefs crumbling away Wat overgrown returning to earth”   Fields’ memories rhyme with my own:   “Rolling through these jungles News footage in my head I don’t have to spell it out”   And this:   “I feared seeing it as a boy Then thought I never would Mekong The wake of empires Spreading out”   Fields reanimates the Imagist impulse:   “Magnificent ruins, Forest and culture In symbiotic rush”   Fields visited Cambodia in 2009, during the trial of former Khmer Rouge prison camp commander Kang Kek Iew, known as “Comrade Duch”:   “Duch is on trial today. Head of Tuol Sleng, S-21. Old Party pols are trembling He’s not the only one”   From the beautiful landscape and temples, Fields move on to recent history and genocide:   “Decimated An entire country Many times over Some for wearing glasses”   Fields concludes the poem:   “The world is dark With us. Even Electricity darkens. Only a few— Honored in crumbling ruins Built by darkeners darkened In their turn— Only a wild heedlessness A spare carefulness for those we love Suffice”

9 reflections

“Happiness is the search for happiness.”  I’m not so sure. My understanding is that there are no happy lives, only happy moments. Those moments seem to be the byproduct of right living. A life dedicated fulltime to achieving happiness is likely to be filled with respites of pleasure, long stretches of disappointment and much unhappiness for others, like second-hand smoke. Some people, like spoiled children, confuse happiness with getting their own way. Most of us never learn what’s best for us and others. You can see the very human fallacy built into that effort: demands can only grow more insistent.   In an 1895 entry in The Journal of Jules Renard (ed. and trans. By Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, 1964,) Renard writes: “I desire nothing from the past. I do not count on the future. The present is enough for me. I am a happy man, for I have renounced happiness.” Hard to say just how tongue-in-cheek that passage is. Renard was a master ironist. He always impresses me as a realist, a rejector of pie-in-the-sky grandiosities. Bogan writes in her preface:   “Renard’s passion for factual truth and stylistic exactitude, once formed, remained central to his work throughout his career. This preoccupation never hardened into obsession; one of the great pleasures of reading Renard is the certainty, soon felt by the reader, that nothing is being put down in meanness or malice.”   Renard died on this date, May 22, in 1910, exactly one year after writing the aphorism-like entry at the top in his journal. He was forty-six years old.   [The quote at the top comes from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]