A Smile in the Mind's Eye by Lawrence Durrell Read Free Book Online

admiring the skilful manipulation of matter, the beauty of function only. Thus one might, from our point of view, find the little memento without much significance while from his it was an exquisite trap set to decorate the circumambient space without and around it. The Chinese aesthetic – well, talk about negative capability! The counterweight to matter was space, the counterpoise to music, silence. The aesthetic lay in the appreciation of the magic fulcrum. Moreover, it weighed aesthetically while working practically! Yes, I had begun to see in a vague sort of way what constituted a delicious aesthetic experience for Jolan Chang. China had moved that much closer to me.
    He was specially struck by the fact that in the gloomy hall of my tumbledown old house I had stuck up four beautiful Chinese panels of wood which I found being auctioned off at the public auctions in Nimes. They had cost almqst nothing. Each one was the height of a man and the wood appeared to be some very stout and beautiful slice of teak. He recognized unhesitatingly that they came from Peking, though in fact the French doctor who had sold them off in Nimes had brought them back from Saigon. They were coloured panels which, so I was told, hang outside the pharmacies in the Far East – advertising, in fact, designed to attract custom. Two were red and two black – the yang and the yin, the two principles of nature. The red had poems engraved on them, and the black medical captions. But just what they said was anyone’s guess, and I had been waiting for someone Chinese to come and translate them for me. I had waited about six years, but when one knows that one is going to live for ever one can afford to wait on time with happy resignation. Now Chang had given these the most meticulous and delighted examination, and proposed to translate them for me in good round English. They did, he said, indeed hang outside Oriental pharmacies. The red had some health-giving poetry upon them while the black carried a sort of admonitory caption citing the name of some great medical master of the past. It was as if one saw on such a panel in Europe the legend MEDICAL PRINCIPLES AS OUTLINED BY PARACELSUS. Nor had I been wrong about the two colours standing for the two cosmic principles. It was the old rocking-chair of the Tao. I had by now realized that all the Chinese, without exception, were Taoist in their philosophical and aesthetic aspect and Confucian in their dogmatic and theological aspect. The great penetration and balance of Chinese intellectual and aesthetic life was centred upon this fruitful marriage. In just such a way, too, the French have managed to arrive at a fruitful and harmonious marriage of Rabelais and Pascal, of Montaigne and Descartes, in their basic natures. My panels themselves were handsome in the extreme and I was glad that at last – even in an inadequate foreign translation – they would be able henceforward to speak to me.
    LEGEND ON RED PANEL
    Four wells full of clouds and smoke spreading the grasses.
    LEGEND ON RED PANEL
    A full courtyard with the wind and the dew engendering flowers.
    LEGEND ON BLACK PANEL
    The Art of Medicine will profit by taking into account the skill of Wah To in opening stomachs and cleaning them.
    LEGEND ON BLACK PANEL
    The Art of Surgery profits by recalling the techniques of Pian Cha in opening the chest and in transplanting hearts.
    Chang did not have the books to hand to fill in the biographical details about the two doctors, but he promised to repair the omission the moment he got to Cambridge where he was going to spend ten days consulting about the avant-propos he had been offered for his book and various other matters. Apparently there was a very choice if small Chinese reference library at Cambridge – I did not know this. Yet true to his word he rang me up about a week after his departure and said that he had looked up the two doctors. He was very excited by the panel devoted to