A Table of Green Fields by Guy Davenport (ebook reader .txt) 📕

but don't do it. I cannot bear the fear of death in its eyes. Kill a sheep instead.

—This is a thing I did, the duke replied. You have learned of things in my court.

—Yes, Meng Tze said with a smile. And I see hope for you in it. It was not the ox but your heart you were sparing.

—The people thought otherwise. They said I begrudged an ox. Qi is but a small dukedom, but I can afford the sacrifice of an ox. It had such innocent eyes and it did not want to die.

—And yet you sent for a sheep. You knew the pity you felt for the ox. How was the sheep different?

—You make a point, the duke said. You show me that I scarcely know my own mind.

—The minds of others, rather.

—Yes. You are searching for compassion in me, aren't you? In The Book of the Odes it is written the minds of others I am able by reflection to measure. You have seen why I spared the ox and was indifferent to the misery of the sheep. 1 did not know my own mind.

—If, Meng Tze said with great politeness, you will allow me to play that lute there by the bronze and jade vessels, I will sing one of the most archaic of the odes, as part of our discourse.

The duke with correct deference asked him by all means to sing it.

Meng Tze, finding the pitch, sang:

The world's order is in the stars.

We are its children, its orphans.

Cicadas shrill in the willows.

It is not fault, it is not guilt

that has brought us to this. It is

disorder. We were not born to it.

The autumn moon is round and red.

I have not troubled the order,

yet I am no longer in it.

In the first waywardness we could

have gone back. In the second we

began to confuse lost and found.

Had we been angry to be lost,

would we have taken disorder

for order, if any had cared?

Cicadas shrill in the willows.

There was a time we had neighbors.

The autumn moon is round and red.

Men without character took us

into the marshes, neither land

nor river, where we cannot build.

Order is harmony.

It is innovation in tradition.

The autumn moon is round and red.

Elastic words beguiled our ears.

What is the courage worth of fools?

Cicadas shrill in the willows.

Fat faces and slick tongues sold

us disorder for real estate.

The autumn moon is round and red.

The young lord's trees are tender green.

Saplings grow to be useful wood.

Hollow words are the wind blowing.

Cicadas shrill in the willows.

There was a time we had neighbors.

The autumn moon is round and red.

10

 

The dove is over water in Scripture: over the flood with an olive twig in its beak, the rainbow above; over the Jordan with Jesus and John in it, upon the sea as Jonah (which name signifieth dove), up out of the sea as Aphrodite (whose totem animal it was). It was the family name of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

The horse is the body, its stamina, health, and skills. The hound is faith and loyalty. But symbols are not sense but signs.

Mencius's Chinese cock (tail the color of persimmons, breast the color of the beech in autumn, legs blue) and unimaginable Chinese dog have become under Concord skies a biblical dove, a Rover, and a bay horse. The one is a pet, one is a friend, one is a fellow worker.

We lose not our innocence or our youth or opportunity but our nature itself, atom by atom, helplessly, unless we are kept in possession of it by the spirit of a culture passed down the generations as tradition, the great hearsay of the past.

 

11

 

Thoreau was most himself when he was Diogenes.

12

 

One ship speaks another when they pass on the high seas. There is a naval metaphor in the paragraph (misprinted as spoken to in modern ignorance). Thoreau and his brother John had sailed around the world in August of 1839, all on the Concord and Merrimac, and you could see him in his sailboat on the Concord with a crew of boys, or the smiling Mr. Hawthorne, or the prim Mr. Emerson.

CONVERSATION

 

The mouse, who left abruptly if Thoreau changed from one tune to another on his flute, was a good listener.

—A man who is moral and chaste, Mr. Thoreau said to the mouse, does not pry into the affairs of others, which may be very different from his own, and which he may not understand. —O yes! said the mouse. But the affairs of others are interesting. You can learn all sorts of things.

—The housekeeping of my soul may seem a madman's to a Presbyterian or a bear.

The mouse twitched his whiskers. Offered a crumb of hoe-cake, he took it, sitting on Mr. Thoreau's sleeve, sniffed it, and began a diligent chewing.

The mouse knew all about the lead pencils and their inedible shavings, the surveyor's chain, the Anakreon in Greek (edible), the journal with pressed leaves between the pages, the fire (dangerous), the spider family in the corner (none of his business), but it was the flute and the cornmeal that bound him to Mr. Thoreau. And the friendliness.

14

 

The man under the enormous umbrella out in the snow storm is Mr. Thoreau. Inspecting, as he says. Looking for his dove, his hound, his horse.

15

 

Diogenes was an experimental moralist. He found wealth in owning nothing. He found freedom in being a servant. He discovered that owning was being owned. He discovered that frankness was sharper than a sword. If we act by design, by principle, we need designers. Designers need to search. Mr. Thoreau discovered that the dove is fiercer than a lion when he sat in the Concord jail, like Diogenes. Why should a government come to him to finance its war in Mexico and pay a clergy he could not listen to? Let them find their own money. Let them write laws an honest man can obey. He would write his sentences. That was his genius.