phosphorus: “Why not plant it in Nothing At All Town or in Vast Nothing Wilds?”—Just that.
Aosta, October 15
My Friend,
But the brother and sister XXXX did they XX and if-but It’s getting cold now, the garden will get its first frost soon, any day.
What of the sister’s empty room? How he passed it many times each day, though he’d always thought he’d be the one to die first—
And of those taken into the lazar houses it was written: “The leper brothers are to remain by themselves, and likewise the sisters by themselves. They are to have four fires a day as needed for which they will receive two baskets of peat. Every Sunday they are to receive ten white loaves, five for the brothers and five for the sisters. All are to work together for the house and allow no harm to come to it. They are to have a bier for carrying the dead.”
In the harshness of but no form of attachment can Often I think I wouldn’t know you if I saw you again
In the foreground of one fresco, the butcher shop’s barred window—
The man in torn clothes I wrote you of—he’s wearing just one shoe and is off in a corner away from the others—what do the others think of him why do they let him sit there why is he there what is he doing?
I must close I’ve got to stop now
Think of the clear mountain water rushing alongside these winding streets—
Your Friend,
My Friend, in your last letter you started to write “but no form of attachment can” and then you stopped and crossed it out but I’ve been wondering, No form of attachment can—can what? and the suffering you feel and this question of your open eyes
Zhuangzi writes of the “blindness of the mind.” I feel this acutely in myself I don’t know how to
I don’t know how to write to you today
XX
Mon—mend shirt
Tues—buy more ink
”qin” means “lute”
ask Mr. Lin about the “torch of chaos and doubt”
TRANSLATION OF CAO XUEQIN’S 8TH NOTE:
A month of dust storms. I stay inside reading Zhuangzi. Only Zhuangzi. Even indoors my lungs burn and my eyes sting. I’ve caulked the window with rags. For over five weeks Red Inkstone hasn’t come. Animals walk with blinded eyes. Sometimes I dream sand’s falling around me faster than I can dig it away I try to speak but make only choking sounds. No sooner is the road cleared than it vanishes. There are so many maimed, deformed people in Zhuangzi’s book. Some have only one foot, one is so bent and crooked his chin nearly touches his navel, his left shoulder juts up above his head. The leper woman fears she’ll give birth to a child covered with sores. Yet Zhuangzi finds beauty in all this. If a man is cast aside he’s useless and to Zhuangzi that’s a form of freedom, of goodness. “The cinnamon can be eaten and so it gets cut down, the lacquer tree can be used and so it gets hacked apart.” Better to be useless. The man who’s seen as undesirable, maybe he can become free? No one wants or asks anything of him, or expects him to be other than he is. I sit inside and listen to the swarming dust. Lambs and goats stumbling and bleating.
Clerval’s grown thinner, sometimes his hands shake. Now when he isn’t translating he’s reading Zhuangzi. Often he looks puzzled as he reads. Why can I see his face, often his whole body, whereas Claire came to me only in pieces, and mostly with her face turned away?
It seems what you thought of as my ugliness wouldn’t have bothered Zhuangzi. What I’ve hated in myself he wouldn’t have hated.
Clerval sits in his hard wooden chair for hours. Sometimes he speaks a few stories from the Zhuangzi out loud (I watch the small movements of his lips), or picks up his pen, translates a passage here and there:
“One day when Carpenter Shih comes home after rejecting an old, rotting oak tree, it appears to him in a dream. ‘You said I was a worthless tree, that boats made out of my timbers would sink, coffins quickly rot, and vessels break at once. But what are you comparing me with? Those useful trees, the pear, the cherry, the apple?—as soon as their fruit is ripe they’re yanked around, torn apart, and subjected to all sorts of abuse. Their utility makes life miserable for them. But I—I long to be of no use, and though