The Adventures of Nasreddin and the Hat he Bought for Six Tangas

Nasreddin bought a tubeteika at the bazaar for six tangas. Everyone he met asked him: “How much money did the tubeteika cost you?” Nasreddin answered to the first of them, he answered to the second of them, he answered to the third of them, than he said: “If I answer to everyone, I will go crazy.” He took the tubeteika off his head, ran to the bazaar, and cried: “Hey, people! Go quickly to the square, gather somewhere there! The Big-ones have something to tell you.” All the people gathered at the square, and no one else remained in the city. Nasreddin came upon a high place, and cried: “Hey people, just to let you know, I bought this tubeteika for six tangas”

A tubeteika

[source]

That Ten-Hour Hard-Seat Joyride from Beijing West Station to Jining, Inner Mongolia

Datong station, August 2018

I remembered that ten-hour hard-seat joyride from Beijing West Station 北京西站 to Jining 集宁, Inner Mongolia because of this article which was about mean people who hogged seats which didn't belong to them on a train somewhere in China.

It was a little different on the ten-hour hard-seat joyride from Beijing West Station to Jining, Inner Mongolia, because when it started, there was not enough seats for everyone. I had a ticket in hand which had my seat number on it, and I assumed it was same for the others, too. Even so, many people had to be content to stand in the aisle. How this works is still a mystery to me.

Jining is not very far away from the capital, just about 500 kilometers. Train-wise, this translates to eight hours, because although rail between major cities in the country have largely become high-speed links, the region of Ulanqab ᠤᠯᠠᠭᠠᠨᠴᠠᠪ remains for now a forgotten backwater country brimming with clean air, friendly bogans, barbarians on horseback, and a crap ton of nothing. No high-speed rail just yet for this place! Seats on Chinese trains came in four grades: soft bed, hard bed, soft seat, and hard seat. The last one has the sole advantage of being cheap as dirt. It was also the only one available because I booked my seat too late. I say this in my defense! No one in their right mind puts themselves through this ordeal willingly.

Before the train left the civilized world, I had some time to text Mom: my train is now sprinting towards the open steppes, at snail's pace! I spoke too soon! Very soon the train came to Yanqing District 延庆区, a mountainous area which (I learned later) was prone to landslides. Rail operators here become tetchy over the mildest drizzle and would grind the train to a halt whenever it began to look a little wet. The PA system put it this way: we are stopping the train because of heavy rain. What rain? I looked out to see slightly damp trees swaying gently on verdant slopes. Meanwhile, the eight-hour ride morphed into a ten-hour ride before our very impatient eyes.

I must mention here that the rail service hires peddlers to sell anything from packed lunch, stationery, cheap toys to spectacles and medicine to the passengers. These people are overjoyed about the delay and wasted no time making the biggest profit they could out of our misery, raucously announcing their goods up and down the aisle. You have no idea about the amount of useless crap people would buy when they have been jammed in together in hard seats and needed something to distract themselves with. I bought a novelty smartphone holder this way; I bought two, actually, but they weren't very good. 

Milk candy for the lactose tolerant, USB cables for phone addicts, reading glasses for old people — and, of course, who can forget the local produce? To the refugees from Beijing's apocalyptic hellscape, Mongolia must have seemed God's own country, flowing with milk and honey! We grow blueberries here, announced one, rattling off a list of health benefits of the fruit which erupt from the soil of the unspoiled steppes with the most bombastic wholesomeness. You! She pointed at me — I was wearing my Dad's Xiamen University 厦门大学 shirt that trip, accidentally marking myself as a hapless southerner — Betcha don't get that good shit in Fujian! And so this show played out all ten hours, while the train swung first by Kalgan 张家口, then by Datong 大同, then finally to Jining, where my friend Peter and his parents were waiting.

An eight-hour train ride is terrible, but a ten-hour train ride is something that will forge undying friendship between complete strangers. I offered my seat to a random dude in the aisle, feeling slightly guilty of keeping the seat all to myself. This he accepted until a short while later when he offered it back to me again, and I would sit for another half-hour, etc. Eventually, we both agreed that the hard seat sucked, and that we would very much prefer just standing in the aisle together. He tried to start a rapport with me by asking for some light reading, but demurred when I said it was a Taiwanese book, written with traditional characters. 

A lady was bringing her daughter to see her grandma in Jining. The girl was cute and smol and hyperactive, in other words a huge headache for her mother, who wailed: come back! What's wrong with you? They'll kidnap you and you'll never see me again, you little devil! as she ran up and down the length of the cabin. I laughed and rooted for the kid inwardly, because she is meant to be as free as a bird, and this metal tube is no place for her. Gosh, I hope they are doing well now.

I think I'll always remember this Ten-Hour Hard-Seat Joyride from Beijing West Station to Jining, Inner Mongolia. This shall go down as an unexpectedly awesome decision that I would never make again. All you future pilgrims and tourists, best be flying in next time!

Earning the Funny Hat

Col de Mollendruz, June 2013

Four years' apprentice work to advance human knowledge; what kind of life is it? We could see how it is from way off: thankless, isolating drudgery — no wonder so many have been repelled by what they see, and never consider going down such a path! But those who do go down such a path do so despite this same clear view. Some do it because of a vague sense of destiny, and I just so happen to be one of these loonies.

Four years ago, I joined the PhD programme in a mixed state of boredom interfused with a feeling that I could do anything, marching in with a prayer on my lips — not so much a prayer, but more like a haughty demand to the almighty: I demand the right to be stupid! If what scientists do is exploring the unknown, then what greater raison d'être do we have other than our ignorance? Confront us with what we do not know, and let us charge right through it! And my Rabbouni answered my prayers (or acceded to my tantrums) all through four years. This is his still ongoing story.

Ignorance is in abundance, and there is no question about it. One of the first thing that would strike one freshly entering a community of scientists is how ill-equipped everyone is for tackling the frontiers of human knowledge. At least, it seemed to be the case coming from the undergraduate days, where questions have answers and those same answers could be unearthed in a week by a brilliant enough person. Every answer to a research question, by its very necessity, a stab in the darkness, an oppressive darkness where one could no longer reliably tell between right from wrong, rigour from quackery, or gravitas from frivolity. I did not know much, and the supervisors, with all the experience to bring them where they are now, are only just slightly further ahead, engulfed by the same ignorance, pawing about blindly, just as we are, for a glimpse of the same certitude of truth that existed in memories of bright school days long gone.

It is at the precipice overlooking this snarling void where my supervisor perched me, and let me plunge — or shoved me right into it; it was hard to tell.

With the darkness came failure — persistent, repeated, soul-crushing failure, fatigue and the laughable blunders that it brings, are the demons who walk with us and torment us in our waking hours. I lost sight of any chance of easy victory. If I had fantasies of becoming a trailblazer of scientific progress, I cast them behind me. Failure! Failed attempts became so frequent and numerous that any victory, however small, came to be met with a mute surprise rather than jubilation. Yes, I throw up my hands in excitement whenever things go according to plan! But then I have to weep and repent, because I am again reminded of the weight of my sins, of all the time I have wasted in my failures.

My self-worth was no longer bolstered by achievements, because such events seemed too much like providence, and so I accepted them as such. Defeat is my natural condition, while victory is foisted upon me most undeservedly.

A salient feature of this part of my faith journey is how secular the environment was and how much of my Rabbouni's message was handed down to me by my colleagues, most of whom were non-believers. A collaborator wrote this as part of his email signature: "The role of the scientist is to produce as many bad ideas as possible". Soon after, another colleague whom I have come to admire lived out this role, during our discussions, rattling out all sorts of outlandish ideas at me for me to try for a study. The volume of it was overwhelming, and the bulk of it was bullshit. But it was such apparent frivolity that betrayed a certain nimbleness of mind and a sense of adventure — he was sailing in the darkness, slicing huge gashes into it, not merely prodding at it timidly. Looking at what he does, I realise that despite my conceited demands for ignorance, I was not yet ready to embrace it. I was still a proud man who refused to bend down and lash his nose to the plough, rather than the small Therèse who accepted the littleness of her spirit and could therefore embrace the world in all its oversized and overwhelming ineffability.

No miracle of the sun marked the reconciliation between work-life and prayer-life. The two halves circled the arena like fighting cockerels in a pen, breaking out at times in spectacular bouts of combat... and then, imperceptibly, work took on the intensity of prayer, and prayer took on the rigours of work. My Rabbouni guides me wordlessly, holding me up by the arms like I was a child taking my first steps. He tuts, he hums absently, he says nothing in words. I take a step, I take two; I discover a new corner in the room, and then a new corner again, each new place a paradise of wondrous delights, ever a pleasant surprise.

 (April-June 2018)

The Adventures of AlphaGo and Lee Sedol (Game 5)

AlphaGo: *plays*
Lee Sedol: that's not a human move
Commentators: that's not a human move
AlphaGo Team: that's not a human move! AlphaGo, is that a human move?
AlphaGo: No, but
*looks into camera*
I did not come all the way to Seoul
just to play like human
The End.

[Business Insider, 2016]

Bibliography
[1] Silver, Schrittwieser, Simonyan, et al., Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge, Nature 550, 354 (2017)

House of Kindness

Bitola (Monastir), 1917 [Source: French Ministry of Culture]

Excerpt from chapter thirty-two of Life in the Tomb (Greek: Η ζωή εν τάφω) by Stratis Myrivilis, in which Sergeant Anthony Kostoulas takes a break from the trenches to nurse his bad leg, and is welcomed warmly into a Slavonic village.

The peasants who are my hosts welcomed me cordially, without any fuss. The moment I remained alone in their midst they began to talk to me all at once in a language which I don't understand but which I never tire of hearing. There are two old men, one youth, five or six women, and a whole army of babies. They all live in two contiguous houses sharing a roofed verandah which is extremely long and wide. There kept speaking to me energetically, all at once, and smiling, until they realized that their language was completely incomprehensible to me.

"Ne znaish... ne znaish?" (Don't you understand?)
"Ne znai?!" (Doesn't he understand?!)

Then, all together, they stopped talking to me and instead began to discuss me among themselves, struggling to divine what answers I would have given to the questions they had been asking for such a long time. While talking they kept turning and looking at me. I looked back at them, and smiled rather stupidly. Then they burst out laughing.

"Ne znaish." (You don't understand.)

But I did understand one thing extremely well: that these were simple, industrious, tormented people. I understood moreover that their words were benevolent, as pure and unadulterated as their bread, all fragrant with compassion and sympathy. That was why tears had welled into my eyes when they surrounded me and wrapped me in their kindhearted loquaciousness; why my hands had strained to enlarge themselves sufficiently to clasp the immense, rough palms as cragged as the bark of an oak.

I tremble in the very depths of my being when Anjo's two little daughters scramble onto my knees. I am bewildered and awkward in their presence; I have been away from children for so long that I don't know how to behave. They rummage endlessly in the bottomless pockets of my greatcoat. Just as they think they've come to the last one they suddenly discover still another (there are no end of pockets in these French coats). I understand their exclamation: "So many pockets!" and I see that the adults share their wonderment.

These two little girls are twins, so identical that they seem like two brightly colored gumdrops pressed out of the same mold. They have red cheeks, blue eyes and blond hair. In their corn-colored pigtails Anjo has braided strips of red and blue cloth with turquoise beads at the ends. The children are always full of mischief, their tiny roses and entire faces always filthy from the roasted corn which they never cease munching. As for their mother, she works away at her loom, her bare feet large and white as they move up and down on the treadles. She too is blond, tall. She speaks slowly, with measured words. Quite frequently she stops, shuttle in hand, and cheerfully scolds my tiny girlfriends who, serious and vociferous, hold veritable conferences about the insignia on my cap. Am I "Grrts" or "Srrp," Greek or Serb? Declare yourself! Their mother tells them that I am a "Grrts," a "dobar kristianin," and... to be careful of my aching leg.

But truly, at this point I am neither a Christian nor a Greek nor a Serb, but simply a human being filled with expectations, nostalgia and fatigue: an exhausted, content human being who admires these people -- envies them -- for being the lovely, openhearted creatures of a beneficent God. I marvel because every one of them (with the exception of the emaciated son) is strongly built and tall, with the simplicity possessed by mankind as a whole before it departed from the straight and narrow path. There are near God and near the earth, all of them. This you perceive from the very moment you set eyes on them. Their home, lamps, clothing, bread, plough, furniture: each is a piece of work which has passed through their industrious hands. Everything inside this house represents a victory in the never-ending battle which these hands have waged against raw material. That is why they are so gnarled, all calluses and knots, as though made of oak.

Their diet consists of cheese pies, peppers, lentils, flour-thickened soup strewn with red pepper, whole wheat bread, and large baked squashes which they cut into immense slices and eat the way we eat melon. They drink cold, refreshing water. They work the soil, which accords them a simple, monotonous happiness. Afterwards, when they grow old and infirm, their large tormented bodies spread over the ground like overripe fruit fallen from a tree, and they return to the earth. There they peacefully dissolve together with all their ancestors. Above them the golden wheat sprouts to its full height once more, the corn soughs throughout the night, and the reapers sing their ancient meandering songs. As for their souls (if we must assume that such things exist) these ascend towards heaven from the earthen thurible, like incense.

I watch these people in the evening as they stretch out on the floor to relax. Propped on one elbow, and using coarsely-whittled holders, they silently smoke a kind of colossal cigarette which they roll ever so slowly and lick with infinite care. The smoke rises to the ceiling and disappears. They watch absentmindedly as its slender bluish-white ribbon leaves the end of the cigarette and, with gentle quavers, ascends either directly or with undulations into the peaceful air which smells of haystacks, threshed cord, and newly scythed grass. This is how their souls will ascend toward the Lord's feet when the proper moment arrives.

Reclining like this for hours, they smoke away in silence. Perhaps they are thinking. Now and then they utter a word or two in a conversation as brief as the exchange of passwords; then they relapse into silence. On the other hand, they may not be thinking at all, and this should be hardly surprising, for simple people have the habit of relaxing not only to the depths of their bodies but to the depths of their minds. Thought for them is not a sickness; it is work. Until recently, they never even realized how happy they were. Only now have they recognized this happiness, now that they have seen the foreign hordes pouring in from the four corners of the earth, rushing to the attack across their fields and cemeteries, trampling their unapprehended well-being underfoot. "They are trampling it," their philosophy must stammer; "ergo it exists." Crossing themselves energetically, they pray God to restore their peace. Months ago a shell came through the ceiling of the verandah and left this House of Peace gravely wounded. This happened one summer; a bit of swallow's nest is still attached to the splintered beam. If only all those responsible for war would come to this place where I am sitting and writing, could fall on their knees in the center of our large verandah and gaze upwards through the gash which the cannons have left in the ceiling of this beneficent home, murdering its swallows! Through this gash they would perceive the blue eyes of an austere, wrathful God -- and then (perhaps) they would stop making war.

I am filled with reverence for this wounded roof which covers so much kindness. Blessings upon this holy sanctuary which has received me so hospitably beneath its red tiles and has stretched its protection over my suffering body. May heaven repay it for everything, and restore its persecuted swallows. Amen.

(Translated from the Modern Greek by Peter Bien)