All History Is One Bad Dream

Chinese literature and poetry is rife with the contemplation of fallen civilizations and lost grandeur. I was too distraught yesterday to compose so much as a single sentence, so Brendan O’Kane, an extraordinarily talented translator of Chinese poetry, beat me to the punch with his rendition of a poem by the Yuan Dynasty poet Ma Zhiyuan. Ma would have been 29 when the Song Dynasty fell in 1279 to a Mongol invasion, so he would have had ample experience of cataclysm and disaster.

Standing in humble homespun robes,

I question history’s men of great esteem:

What use were all your kingly plans;

How long endured the tyrant’s scheme?

Palaces from the Six Dynasties

Now fertilize the farmer’s grain,

And scraggly catalpa trees

Mark loyal ministers’ remains:

All history is one bad dream.

Of course, it is a new day today and we have to pick ourselves off the floor and start moving forward again. Strangely, I find myself much more interested in submerging in ancient Chinese history than I do in reading The New York Times. And so I recall the opening lines of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, itself the story of the fall of the Han Dynasty.

Here begins our tale. The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.

History is great for giving us perspective, though perhaps a little less effective at helping us live through the now.

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