The Year of Rice and Salt

'Tragedies make a darker reconciliation. Scholar White said of them, they tell the story of humanity face to face with reality itself, therefore facing death and dissolution and defeat. Tragic heroes are destroyed, but for those who survive to tell their tale, there is a rise in consciousness, in awareness of reality, and this is valuable in and of itself, dark though that knowledge may be.'

At this point in his lecture Zhu Isao paused, and looked around the room until he had located Bao, and nodded at him; and though it seemed they had only been speaking of abstract things, of the shapes stories took, Bao felt his heart clench within him.

Zhu proceeded: 'Now, I suggest that as historians, it is best not to get trapped in one mode or another, as so many do; it is too simple a solution, and does not match well with events as experienced. instead we should weave a story that holds in its pattern as much as possible. It should be like the Daoists' yin yang symbol, with eyes of tragedy and comedy dotting the larger fields of dharma and nihilism. That old figure is the perfect image of all our stories put together, with a dark dot of our comedies marring the brilliance of dharma, and the blaze of tragic knowledge emerging from black nothingness.

'The ironic history by itself, we can reject out of hand. Of course we are bad; of course things go wrong. But why dwell on it? Why pretend this is the whole story? Irony is merely death walking among us. It doesn't take up the challenge, it isn't life speaking.

'But I suppose we also have to reject the purest version of dharma history, the transcending of this world and this life, the perfection of our way of being. It may happen in the bardo, if there is a bardo, but in this world, all is mixed. We are animals, death is our fate. So at best we could say the history of the species has to be made as much like dharma as possible, by a collective act of the will.

'This leaves the middle modes, comedy and tragedy.' Zhu stopped, held up his hands, perplexed. 'Surely we have a great deal of both of these. Perhaps the way to construct a proper history is to inscribe the whole figure, and say that for the individual, ultimately, it is a tragedy; for the society, comedy. If we can make it so.'

Zhu Isao's own predilection was clearly for comedy. He was a social creature. He was always inviting Bao and some others from the class, including the League's Minister for Health of the Natural World, to the rooms provided for him during his stay, and these small gatherings were sparked by his laughter and curiosity about things. Even his research amused him. He had had a great many books shipped down from Beijing, so that every room of his apartment was filled like a warehouse. Because of his growing conviction that history should be the story of everyone who had ever lived, he was now studying anthologies of biography as a genre, and he had many examples of the form in his apartment. This explained the tremendous number of volumes standing everywhere, in tall unsteady stacks. Zhu picked up one huge tome, almost too heavy for him to lift: 'This is a first volume,' he said with a grin, 'but I've never found the rest of the series. A book like this is only the antechamber to an entire unwritten library.'

The collection of lives genre seemed to have begun, he said as he tapped the piles affectionately, in religious literatures: collections of the lives of Christian saints and Islamic martyrs, also Buddhist texts that described lives through long sequences of reincarnations, a speculative exercise that Zhu clearly enjoyed very much: 'Dharma history at its purest, a kind of proto politics. Plus they can be so funny. You see a literalist like Dhu Hsien trying to match up his subjects' death and birth dates exactly, so that he creates strings of prominent historical actors through several reincarnations, asserting that he can tell they have always been one soul by what they do, but the difficulties of getting the dates to match up cause him in the end to select some odd additions to his sequences to make them all match life to life. Finally he has to theorize a "work hard then relax" pattern in these immortals, to justify those who alternate lives as geniuses and generals with careers as minor portrait artists or cobblers. But the dates always match up!' Zhu grinned delightedly.

He tapped other tall piles that were examples of the genre he was studying: Ganghadara's. 'Forty six Transmigrations', the Tibetan text 'Twelve Manifestations of Padmasambhava', the guru who established Buddhism in Tibet; also the 'Biography of the Gyatso Rimpoche, Lives One Through Nineteen', which brought the Dalai Lama up to the present; Bao had once met this man, and had not realized then that his full biography would take up so many volumes.