The New Lifetime Reading Plan

The novel depicts life in the household of Hsi-men Chmg [Ximen Qing], a merchant in a provincial city of China: his business dealings, his amorous intrigues, his ill-gotten gains, and finally his death, the disintegration of his household, and the thwarting of his schemes. The novel, in 100 chapters, is enormously long and dense, with numerous plot twists and narrative byways; it has been compared to the works of Joyce [110] and Nabokov [122]. But whatever the book's complexity Hsi-men Cfring remains its focai figure, and he is one of the most marvelous scoundrels in ali of world literature. He is sex­ually insatiable, and this lust is symbolic of his more general greed for money, power, and pleasure. His six wives and con- cubines are not merely companions and playthings: One joins his household after he conspires with her to poison her hus- band; another is the seduced former wife of his neighbor and sworn brother. Just as he stops at nothing in assembling his harem, so he is contemptuous of ordinary morality in his busi­ness dealings; his philosophy of life is to grab what he can when he can, and devil take the hindmost.

The concept of a charming literary villain is not so shock- ing to us nowadays, but to a traditional Confucian Chinese readership Hsi-men Ch'ing was not merely titillating, he was profoundly threatening. Two of the founding principies of Confucian morality are that human nature is by nature good, and that social order proceeds from the benevolent influence of the ruler radiating throughout the realm (see Mencius [14]). The author of the Chin P mg Mei—and it is no wonder that he took pains to preserve his anonymity—is telling his readers that human nature is, on the contrary, immoral and opportunistic, and that in contemporary society there is no sign of transforming, benevolent virtue diffusing outwards from the throne. In its own time, then, the Chin P mg Mei was a work of social criticism verging on sedition. Today that impact has become somewhat blunted, but the fascinating tale of greed, folly and retribution remains for us to enjoy. We will also notice that in its psychologically authentic characters, its multilayered plot, and its focus on the affairs of a single wealthy household, this novel points directly ahead to Dream of the Red Chamber [56], the greatest of ali works of tradi­tional Chinese fiction.

The Chin P mg Mei is, though, a very long novel, with an involved story and an enormous east of characters with (to most Americans) very unfamiliar-sounding names. It is not dif- ficult to read, but it is difficult to get started reading. You might want to wait to read this until you have already flexed your literary muscles on a couple of other very long novйis— say, Don Quixote [38] and The Tale of Genji [28]. Choose the best possible translation, too; Clement Edgerton^ four-volume version is good; David Roy's translation, of which only the first of a projected five volumes has been published as of this writ- ing, is truly brilliant.

J.S.M.

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GALILEO GALILEI

1574-1642

Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

Galileo is the sort of man who gives the Renaissance its good reputation. Born into a good bourgeois family in Pisa, he stud- ied mathematics, made a career as a scholar, and lived a happy, even somewhat self-indulgent, life. If his only accomplishment had been to make his seminal discoveries in astronomy and what we would now call astrophysics, he would rank high on any list of all-time great scientists. But his scientific work encompasses far more than that. As a military engineer, he demonstrated that the path of a projectile follows the mathe- matical curve called a parabola (paving the way, for good or ill, for modern artillery and the ballistic missile). He was an exper­imental physicist of true genius, who discovered that ali falling bodies (leaving aside questions of friction or air resistance) accelerate at the same rate, independently of their weight, and who showed that a pendulum of a given length and weight takes a uniform amount of time to complete a swing, regard- less of the swing's amplitude. These discoveries—which had enormous consequences for the further development of physics and engineering—not only went against the conven- tional wisdom of Galileo^ time, but they seem to contradict common sense itself. Galileo's stubborn willingness to pursue his experiments and to state his findings whether or not people initially found them plausible served him well the first time he turned a telescope to the heavens.