"The Pleasures of a Nonconformist" [.]

[fiefoe]

I could have done without some rather trivial pieces in the middle ("The Lady in the Dior Sack", "Dogs in New York", etc.) Combining lucidity with wit, Mr. Yutang is at his best explaining ancient China to a modern and/or western(ized) audience. One outstanding article is about calligraphy, at which I failed for eight years as a youngster. When he compares 犬 in Li-Shu (隶书) to the squatty form of an Irish Terrier, it was a eureka moment for me.

• The beauty of organic rhythm in plant and animal forms has been the chief source of inspiration.
• Into this sensual appreciation of nature's beauty has come another tradition, more Taoistic, more animistic, and more chastened. .. The last refinement of the Chinese aesthetic consciousness is to be found in the total denial of this sensuality, and the acceptance and appreciation of dead, inanimate forms suggestive of dry branches or tree stumps or carved stone.
• Artistic calligraphy stands in relation to the printed type as a tree stands in relation to a street lamppost. The lamppost expresses static symmetry, the tree expresses dynamic beauty.
• The whole outline of the character (背) resemble the posture of a tap dancer. Strictly speaking, the center of gravity is not in the center of the square,... because of this posture... we see a temporary equilibrium caught in the process of movement, and this character consequently becomes alive. ... This tilting of the center of gravity may be compared to "resolution" in music, where a discord is tolerated not in itself, but as a transition to the following chords.
  

For a man who suspected that Lusin (鲁迅) knew too much, he certainly knew plenty himself:

• (Confucius) came from a royal family of Sung .. his family manifested all the fashionable aristocratic troubles, like divorce.
• The west compares the moon to a beauty, while the east compares a beauty's face to a moon.
• Chinese women put up with this sex-based injustice as naturally as Chinese people put up with political injustice.
• Yuan Mei (袁枚) was a naturalist in morals.
• Lusin... is regarded today in Red China as Gorky is in Russia; both dead idols with their mouths shut.
  
• (Lusin) himself was a trained old bureaucrat; all the time he was egging the Peking students on to revolt, he was quietly drawing a salary from the old tottering Peking government he was denouncing. The trouble was that he knew ancient China very well - too well.