I was raised in a tumultuous household where argument was considered a valuable art, to be engaged in wherever and for whatever. It took me years to understand that this was not normal - that many people (my wife included) considered it boring at best and usually disagreeable. I have tried since to contain myself, with only modest results, but I figured that this presidential election would be like the icing on the cake - New York rude vs the Clinton Machine. Could it get any better? As it turned out, oh, yes it could. Boring, no, but disagreeable, yes. Here, we did not have the flaunting of ideas, but rather attacks of such a personal nature that they made me gasp. In the final days before the election, I decided I needed a break. Knowing that I could not avoid the radio and the TV at home, I headed north, where Verizon and most AM radio does not penetrate (I forced myself to ignore NPR, which really does reach everywhere), and where no TV or electricity is known for miles. As it turned out, the election was so abnormal - so unexpected, even historical (regardless of party affiliation) that perhaps I should have stuck around. How could everyone have been so wrong? What is this country all about?
I knew nothing of this until I headed out from the dusty cabin and came within the required distance of the nearest town Wednesday morning. For hours afterwards I felt as if I had entered the Twilight Zone.
In a way, however, I had already been living there for the past four days. With a new book from the library in hand, Shanghai Grand by Taras Grescoe, I had been living in Shanghai, China at its apex in the 1930's, just a few years before the Japanese invasion and later, the dominance of Mao and his Little Red Book. Shanghai has long been associated by me with all things degenerate - prostitutes, drugs, and the shangai-ed sailor who, after being slipped a mickey, would find himself as a reluctant deckhand on some nefarious schooner. I found in this book that all that was there, but it had been much more: the 5th largest city in the world, equipped with electricity and air conditioned luxury suites for the rich and famous from around the world. Much of this was thanks to Victor Sassoon, a British Jew whose family could be traced back to the house of David. As one writer put it, "During the last thousand years, a Sassoon has never been known to be wrong."
Nor was Victor, at least until the arrival of Japanese army. He built the tallest buildings in Asia on the swampy land at the confluence of the Whangpoo and Yangtze rivers, among them the Cathay Hotel, known by many as the Shanghai Grand. Here, the likes of Will Rogers and Noel Coward came to party and luxuriate in perhaps the most extravagant hotel in the world, built from the riches of unrestrained trade from around the world and an endless supply of cheap labor. It was the latter that helped lead to the Glorious People's Republic of China, but that was to come. In this world, the finest art and wines commingled with the most adulated and the most debauched of the world's societies. Sassoon was in the thick of it, and had, like many of the very rich, satisfied his every desire until he was rebuffed by one Emily "Mickey" Hahn, an American author and journalist who instead chose a Chinese poet, Zau Sinmay, as her already-married lover.
And so we have the set-up: vast wealth and luxury lying side by side with slack moral rules in a city that was wide open to everyone and everything. Fame and fortune were everything to the upper echelons here, and everything else - from modesty to restraint - was only for the peasants. One Chinese poet - not Zau, but another of that old Chinese world of mandarin scholars - tried to put it into a greater context. Said he: a branch dangling from a dead tree had more beauty in it than all of Shanghai.
The globe-trotting elite did not listen, of course, and the poet (of course) had the last laugh: few of us know of the "luminaries" of that time, and none are now in possession of their great wealth, but rather, are dust beneath the shadow of that dead branch. We know the lesson - that wealth and pleasure are transitory, an illusion of time.
But I think there is more to it than that; wealth and pleasure are not greater than the dead branch, but are not necessarily less. It is, instead, how one looks at it all that counts.
This is the wisdom of the Orient: that existence itself is an impossible miracle, a stroke of magnificence from Heaven that is incomparable to anything we could know. A dead branch is no less a miracle than the Grand Hotel - but no greater, either. Rather, it is one's approach to everything that matters. What makes fame and wealth and debauchery so wrong is the emphasis put on them, as if to have one or more of these in one's life makes one more than the dead branch. And what makes the dead branch morally superior is that it "knows," is unperturbed by its humbleness and unimpressed with social greatness. So it was with Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, who took loss and gain and pleasure and poverty in equal stride, and so it was with Jesus, who repeatedly told everyone that what they thought was important was not.
Rather, what is important is one's perspective, or, as said, one's approach. It is not that Sassoon or any of his clients were less worthy than the dead branch by themselves, but were so because they believed that they were through the glitter of their accomplishments. Anyone can see that we all go to dust, but who lives the wonder of life regardless, as a prayer of praise to that which created the dust and the man alike? Such a man might become rich through skill and interest, but he most likely would not. To do so without losing oneself would imply wisdom, which would make one not care any more for the Shanghai Grand than one would for the dead branch. In most cases, that would exclude the wealthy and the fame seekers of the Cathay.
And our presidents. Once the braying is over, God grant them the wisdom to understand that they did not understand what they thought they wanted, and needed, so badly. May they understand that their ascension may not be an ascension at all, but a trial through which they might be purified so that they might one day marvel at the branch - if they have the time - more than the trappings of power. FK
I knew nothing of this until I headed out from the dusty cabin and came within the required distance of the nearest town Wednesday morning. For hours afterwards I felt as if I had entered the Twilight Zone.
In a way, however, I had already been living there for the past four days. With a new book from the library in hand, Shanghai Grand by Taras Grescoe, I had been living in Shanghai, China at its apex in the 1930's, just a few years before the Japanese invasion and later, the dominance of Mao and his Little Red Book. Shanghai has long been associated by me with all things degenerate - prostitutes, drugs, and the shangai-ed sailor who, after being slipped a mickey, would find himself as a reluctant deckhand on some nefarious schooner. I found in this book that all that was there, but it had been much more: the 5th largest city in the world, equipped with electricity and air conditioned luxury suites for the rich and famous from around the world. Much of this was thanks to Victor Sassoon, a British Jew whose family could be traced back to the house of David. As one writer put it, "During the last thousand years, a Sassoon has never been known to be wrong."
Nor was Victor, at least until the arrival of Japanese army. He built the tallest buildings in Asia on the swampy land at the confluence of the Whangpoo and Yangtze rivers, among them the Cathay Hotel, known by many as the Shanghai Grand. Here, the likes of Will Rogers and Noel Coward came to party and luxuriate in perhaps the most extravagant hotel in the world, built from the riches of unrestrained trade from around the world and an endless supply of cheap labor. It was the latter that helped lead to the Glorious People's Republic of China, but that was to come. In this world, the finest art and wines commingled with the most adulated and the most debauched of the world's societies. Sassoon was in the thick of it, and had, like many of the very rich, satisfied his every desire until he was rebuffed by one Emily "Mickey" Hahn, an American author and journalist who instead chose a Chinese poet, Zau Sinmay, as her already-married lover.
And so we have the set-up: vast wealth and luxury lying side by side with slack moral rules in a city that was wide open to everyone and everything. Fame and fortune were everything to the upper echelons here, and everything else - from modesty to restraint - was only for the peasants. One Chinese poet - not Zau, but another of that old Chinese world of mandarin scholars - tried to put it into a greater context. Said he: a branch dangling from a dead tree had more beauty in it than all of Shanghai.
The globe-trotting elite did not listen, of course, and the poet (of course) had the last laugh: few of us know of the "luminaries" of that time, and none are now in possession of their great wealth, but rather, are dust beneath the shadow of that dead branch. We know the lesson - that wealth and pleasure are transitory, an illusion of time.
But I think there is more to it than that; wealth and pleasure are not greater than the dead branch, but are not necessarily less. It is, instead, how one looks at it all that counts.
This is the wisdom of the Orient: that existence itself is an impossible miracle, a stroke of magnificence from Heaven that is incomparable to anything we could know. A dead branch is no less a miracle than the Grand Hotel - but no greater, either. Rather, it is one's approach to everything that matters. What makes fame and wealth and debauchery so wrong is the emphasis put on them, as if to have one or more of these in one's life makes one more than the dead branch. And what makes the dead branch morally superior is that it "knows," is unperturbed by its humbleness and unimpressed with social greatness. So it was with Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, who took loss and gain and pleasure and poverty in equal stride, and so it was with Jesus, who repeatedly told everyone that what they thought was important was not.
Rather, what is important is one's perspective, or, as said, one's approach. It is not that Sassoon or any of his clients were less worthy than the dead branch by themselves, but were so because they believed that they were through the glitter of their accomplishments. Anyone can see that we all go to dust, but who lives the wonder of life regardless, as a prayer of praise to that which created the dust and the man alike? Such a man might become rich through skill and interest, but he most likely would not. To do so without losing oneself would imply wisdom, which would make one not care any more for the Shanghai Grand than one would for the dead branch. In most cases, that would exclude the wealthy and the fame seekers of the Cathay.
And our presidents. Once the braying is over, God grant them the wisdom to understand that they did not understand what they thought they wanted, and needed, so badly. May they understand that their ascension may not be an ascension at all, but a trial through which they might be purified so that they might one day marvel at the branch - if they have the time - more than the trappings of power. FK
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