Guess What, The Earth is Spherical

In the past year I have come under the opinion from my reading that people in the middle ages were not half as stupid as they get credit for. If you read a little bit of history about the middle ages, you will find that most history writers paint the mediaeval people as the most ignorant fools that you could imagine. You will hear things such as, "the middle ages' society was backward because of too much importance on religion" (from a Chinese textbook). Or you will read things about the church burning heretics that dared suggest that the earth doesn't have four corners or that the sun doesn't orbit the earth.

Then such historians will then speak of the renaissance as if it were a magical rose arising ex nihilo out of the world's sleeve, not considering that the middle ages was the stem from which bloomed the flower of the renaissance. They don't usually take the time to discuss why the renaissance bloomed out of the context of a Roman Catholic Europe instead of some other place that did not have the supposedly darkening influence of the church.

I suppose that this sort of mentality comes from two sources, Secularism and Protestantism. Secularism, since it took over dominance on Western culture from Christianity, has almost always scoffed at religious belief and religious believers. This is part of the reason that most Secularists so thoroughly misunderstand it. Richard Dawkins' attitude that theology is the study of nothing, since there is nothing to study, explains his ignorance of the topic.

Protestantism in the Reformation made a complete break from Roman Catholicism, and since then they have generally speaking had a mutual dislike. However, when Protestants sympathize with secular writers' view of history simply because they both dislike Catholics, Protestants are shooting themselves in the foot. Protestants need to realize that much of Roman Catholic doctrine is similar to their own and that if they are saying that Catholic doctrine did only harm to Europe socially and philosophically, then they are putting their own belief in a bad light too.

What lead me to think of all of this was something I read recently that confirmed what I had heard: that the mediaeval church actually did not believe in a flat earth. I was reading Augustine's The City of God, Book 16, Chapter 9 "On whether we are to believe in the Antipodes." In this chapter he says he does not believe that people could live on the other side of the earth because people could not have taken a boat across such a vast ocean. (He obviously hadn't heard of the Bering Strait.) Nevertheless, though he did not believe that people lived on the other side of the world, he did believe that the world was spherical. He says, "But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled."

Something I read this morning about the Venerable Bede confirmed this again. He was one of the first ones to write a history of the English people. Besides his history, he also wrote many commentaries on the Bible and some works of his observations of nature. From the latter works, we know that Bede too in the 8th century knew that the earth was round and furthermore had some idea of latitude.

It seems that the middle ages were not the dark ages because of any darkening influence of the church. Rather it seems that the middle ages are dark to the secular man because he is willingly ignorant of them.

L'Ingenu

L'Ingenu is another work by Voltaire. I have not read it yet, but I heard about a humerous story in it.

An American Indian comes to Europe and becomes a Catholic. He is getting lots of advice on how to be a good Catholic. Someone tells him that the book of James says that a person should confess his sins, so the Indian, eager to do the right thing, goes to confess.

After he tells all of his sins to the priest in the confessional booth, he hops out and yanks the door open to the priest's booth. He hauls out the priest and seats him in the confessional booth. The Indian then leaps into the priest's booth and sits down. The priest, confused and disheveled, says, "What are you doing?!"

The Indian replies, "Saint James says, 'Confess your faults one to another.' I have confessed to you; now you are going to confess to me."

Knowledgeable

The addict knows,

The guy I saw asleep beneath past days news knows,

The lady, needle sharing, partner sharing, lady,
now near her end on white sheets knows,

The girl now knows,
The girl who heard the words
"Forever," "always," "true," and "love"
From lips that spoke them countless times before,
Who now has just a memory the night left and
A woman's clinic receipt of payment,

The boy too knows,
Whose pa buys bargain beers
And having neither punching bag nor wife
Gives his boy reminders, blue and black on pale skin,
To stay away from Dad on drinking days,

I well know too
that it "brings forth death."

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This is a draft of a poem that I am working on. I have been meaning to post it for a long time, but have had no time to revise it. I decided just to post it as is rather than to keep waiting.

Candide

I am currently reading Candide by Voltaire. It is about a young boy, Candide, and his tutor, Pangloss. Pangloss has a conviction that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. No matter what happens, Pangloss declares that it is for the best and that this is the best of all possible situations because it is the situation that is. Candide adores his philosopher/tutor and takes Pangloss theory as firm truth until, that is, he encounters horrible troubles in his life and begins to doubt it. The book is short, an easy read and funny.

Here is one of my favorite lines. Candide and Pangloss are going on a voyage along with an Anabaptist named James.

"On the voyage, Pangloss explained to James the perfection of the scheme of things. James disagreed: 'Men must have deviated somewhat from their original innocence,' he said. 'They were not born wolves, but they are become wolves. God did not give them twenty-four pounders nor bayonets, but they have made these things for their own destruction. I might also speak of bankruptcies, and the law which seizes upon the property of bankrupts solely in order to keep it from the creditors.'

"'All that had to be,' replied [Pangloss]. 'Private ills make up the general good. It therefore follows that, the more numerous the private ills, the greater the general good.'

The Little One

Probably most of you know my news by now, but for those who don't: My wife is pregnant.

Just Thursday we went to a doctor to have the three month checkup. This time we went to a new hospital, and the visit went well. We felt very comfortable there because the building was nice and clean, the doctors seemed to know what they were doing (they doubtless take a lot of care to cultivate that image) and the workers there were all friendly.

We had the first ultrasound, or at least the first one in which we could recognize the baby. Now before seeing the baby in the ultrasound I didn't think I would write something about it here because the experience can never really be related in words except perhaps to those who have experienced it themselves. I also thought that I would never, never post that little ultrasound picture on the Internet, so that everyone can squint and say, "What is that?" I always felt that all ultrasounds of little infants in the womb looked like grainy pictures of peanuts.

However when that little peanut happens to be your baby, the whole thing changes. My wife and myself were excited beyond words to see that little one for the first time. I had thought that the tiny guy would not be recognizable at all as a baby, but actually it was very clear. We saw his (I say "he" in the general sense, not knowing the gender of the child) head, body, arms, legs and even backbone. We even saw his heart beating (at least that's what the doctor said it was). He moved several times during the ultrasound. For the first time he seemed like a real guy.

When the nurse first turned the machine on, I saw the infant clearly. A moment later they turned on the screen for my wife to look at. She didn't recognize it at first, but when she did she gasped. She covered her mouth and giggled. She said, "It never seemed real until now!" She was amazed. I enjoyed watching her enjoyment of it as much as I enjoyed seeing the image myself.

Later as we were walking to catch a bus, she was talking excitedly on the phone to her parents. As she talked, she used animated gestures. She was telling them about how we could see each leg separately, and she held her fingers up and made a scissors motion with her fingers to show "separately." They asked her a question, and she said, "yes," nodding her head with a shining smile. She told them, "We saw him put his hand on his head!" and she put her hand on her head. I was the only one that got to enjoy these gestures.

The hospital gave us a printout of the ultrasound picture, and true to the long tradition of ultrasound operators, the picture they gave us resembled a peanut.
















When my sister sent me a picture of the ultrasound of her first child, I wrote out a little bit of doggerel.

The sonograms show my sister's sweet fruit
In a pillowed pouch with a humble mein.
This precious infant whom they say is cute
Looks to me like a human lima bean.

Bad Egg

I was making eggs and potatoes for my wife just now. I had finished frying the potatoes and went to put in the eggs. The first egg was beautiful with a brilliant yellow yolk.

The second egg was putrid, all watery and disgusting, and it splattered all over the pan. The yolk was black and clumpy. The smell was horrible, making the whole house reek. As I was dumping it into the garbage can I was almost vomiting because the smell was so sharp and so horrible.

But then it struck me that the smell of the stinky egg is really exactly the same as the smell of stinky tofu, a common food here. It came to me secondly that I have eaten stinky tofu several times and never vomited while eating it.

Eating stinky tofu is a strange thing to do now that I think about it. When ever people eat it together they always close the jar tightly when they are not taking some so as to avoid making the room stink. Why put something into your mouth that you don't want filling the room with its fragrance?

Further, this experience made me think of another thing. The stinky egg smelled the same as stinky tofu, so would I slurp up a rotten egg if someone told me it was edible?

Toilet in a Glass House

The Philip Johnson Glass House is one of the most famous houses in America. Its walls are made entirely of glass, and inside there are no walls to break your view from one side of the house to the other. There is only one place you cannot look into from the outside, and that is the bathroom. The bathroom is in a circular enclosure of brick on the inside of the house. It was a revolutionary idea to build a house that is walled completely in glass. However to some people, namely architects in China, Johnson didn’t go far enough. Why not make the bathroom walls out of glass too?

Now, I know what you are thinking. Usually the types of activities that you like to perform in the bathroom you like to perform without an audience, so it really would make sense to have an opaque enclosure. But evidently there millions of people who would disagree with you. In China I have come across countless bathrooms that are built with windows in the door or windows on an inner wall.

I remember staying in a nice apartment in a coastal city for a few days with friends. This apartment must have been pricy, being within walking distance of some of the nicest parts of the city and having the best location on the building. Not only did it have good surroundings, but it was nice inside too, its interior design having been professionally done. When you walked inside, you would probably notice two things immediately. The first thing you would notice was the abstract nude on the wall over the plasma TV. A large portion of the canvas was gilt, so it was really shiny. Plus, it had a bold checkerboard pattern on it, which immediately arrested one’s attention, very striking. And then, of course, there was the nude, the gilt abstract nude, sitting on the checkerboard. I never managed to divine the meaning of that piece; I always was an oaf when it comes to art. But anyway, after you had blushed and looked away from the artwork, the second thing you would see was the bathroom at the end of the hallway, especially if someone were in it. Pretty much the entire end of the hallway was glass. The wooden bathroom door was on the left and had windowpanes from bottom to top. The panes were, mercifully, frosted with a light frost or with those little textured snowflakes or something. Behind the glass door was the sink. Then to the right of the door was a wall of glass brick. At the builders’ supply store there are different kinds of glass brick, probably with names like “Ice Land” and “Ocean Cube.” Well, these were the “Keep no Secrets” glass bricks. Behind the glass bricks was the toilet.

My friends, most of them American, were puzzled and distressed by this bathroom. How were they to carry on their business in front of these floor-to-ceiling glass bricks? The regular inhabitants of this house, on the other hand, were accustomed to this open-bathroom concept. Once, as I was walking from the living room down the hallway to the bedroom I was staying in, I was horrified to see the figure of a person undressing very close to the door. It was a slight figure and was wearing dark blue undies, which were pressed tightly against the window. It turns out that the figure was that of the young boy who lived in the apartment. One of my friends told me later that it was the boy I had seen because this friend of mine had come into the hallway on another occasion and had had the same scare.

My foreign friends were a little more careful in their use of the bathroom and put much thought into how they should conduct their activities. It was suggested by some that we should put a test subject in the bathroom, who would then walk around nearer and farther from the door and the glass bricks and shout out their position. “One foot from the door!” they would shout. “Two feet from the door! Three feet from the door!” And those assembled outside to watch would consider the amount of visual distortion caused by the glass related to the distance from the door to see at what distance it might be safe to change clothes, pick one's nose or do other potentially embarrassing activities. Maybe we could work out a mathematical formula, they suggested. Nevertheless, such an experiment was unnecessary, others said, because one can clearly see the toilet through the glass and clearly see if someone were sitting on it. In such a small room the distortion caused by those little snowflakes was insufficient to make them feel comfortable doing anything anywhere in there, they said.

Therefore, the only solution was to erect a physical barrier of some sort so that one could use the restroom with peace of mind. When I walked in the first time, I looked around carefully to strategize how I would use the room. Beside the shower there was a big wooden tub that was about waist high. With that in front of the glass bricks, there would be something in front of the toilet. However, people outside could still see the color of your shirt and so would know who was in there and what they were doing, more than you want them to know. The solution: the shower curtain. By pulling the shower curtain and spreading it out along the tub, you could hide yourself completely, yet this was difficult to do because the curtain barely stretched that far and would fall back off the tub easily, leaving you scrambling to replace it. I snooped around but never found any clothespins anywhere to pin the curtain to the tub. “Anybody know how to say ‘clothespin’ in Chinese?”

That bathroom was probably one of the worst offenders that I’ve seen against an American’s desire for privacy in the privy. But there are many other examples I could share not only from city houses but also from countryside houses. One countryside house that I visited really caught my fancy. If I could buy a vacation house in the countryside, this would be it. It had a covered gate in true Chinese style, and inside the gate was a wonderful little courtyard. On one side of the courtyard was a garden, the other a storage building and the pet cow’s bedroom and opposite the gate was the house. The house had four large rooms, kitchen, master bedroom (with the kang), garage (of sorts) and guest bedroom. It was a beautiful little brick house with a red tile roof. I learned with sorrow yesterday that it is slated to be demolished to make way for a new highway. When the highway is built to ferry spoiled city slickers as quickly as possible past the countryside, it will have been at great cost to the world. Nevertheless, as wonderful as this little house was, its bathroom design was intolerable.

There were two toilets. One was outside of the courtyard wall. The other was in the pet cow's bedroom. When you think of a toilet, you are probably thinking of a sleek porcelain bowl like the one that you sit on to read the local newspaper. Forget that image. These toilets were just rectangular holes in the ground. You might think that this is awful, but actually it’s not. Many people prefer this kind of squat toilet over the porcelain bowl sitting kind because . . . (how do you explain this? tactfully?) . . . well, suffice it to say that some people like it better. Plus it’s much better for public restrooms because it’s more sanitary: you don’t have to touch the seat.

My grief wasn’t with the toilets themselves. The trouble was with their location. The first one was truly an outhouse because it was outside the courtyard as if it were a boon to weary travelers. It was to the left of the gate and was enclosed on three sides with brick and had a kind of cornstalk roof. The cow spent her days out there beside the toilet under a lean to, so you could talk to her whenever you went out to use the restroom. She was a good companion, but I was always afraid that she would try to eat the privy roof while I was in there. The entrance side, which was completely open with no door, was facing the courtyard entrance. You know how a lot of campuses have security shacks at the entrance? And security guards sit there at the entrance of the campus and can see everyone who goes through the gate and can likewise be seen by everyone passing through? That’s the way this toilet was. You could squat there like a diminutive security guard and shout out a hearty “hullo!” to anyone who came to knock on the courtyard gate.

The other toilet inside the courtyard was all the way in the left corner and shared the same pit with the outside toilet. This one was a little more private, but was still had no door and was in full view of whoever was in the courtyard. It was odd that during the day the family (and guest) would use the toilet outside the courtyard and at night use the one inside the courtyard. In short, we would go wherever the cow was.

Like I said above, this was a beautiful little courtyard house. There was nothing wrong with it. I just think that if I were to move there, I would spend about ten minutes to construct a little cornstalk wall for each of the privies so you could feel a little more at ease.

The last example I want to give of an open bathroom is in a business that some of my expat friends and I often frequent. This restroom also has a hole-in-the-ground toilet, but this one is porcelain, can flush and is connected to the sewer. I haven’t heard any of my friends complain about the hole-in-the-ground style toilet here, so I think they are accustomed to it. This restroom is small, a one holer. The door is a wooden door and, you guessed it, has a top-to-bottom frosted window.

Though the toilet itself doesn’t seem to bother people, it’s obvious the door does. Some expats like to go into the restroom with the light off. Enough light comes through the door from the outside for the person to do without it. However, this is an undesirable situation too because when the light is off, it appears from the outside that the restroom is unoccupied. The lock doesn’t really work, so I can only imagine that the person inside is nervously hoping that no one will just trot on in.

Once I was standing outside the restroom talking to somebody, and a lady came, wanting to use the restroom. She asked me, “Is anybody in the bathroom?” I said, “Go ahead and have a look through the window.” She didn’t take my advice.

Having a window in the bathroom door might seem to be advantageous for whoever is outside. That way they can know if the bathroom is occupied or not. Still I don’t think I really want to accidentally see anybody during their alone time.

Despite having lived in China for a few years and becoming accustomed to many things here, I still do not prefer the open-bathroom concept. I would side with the architectural school that says Philip Johnson was wise to include at least the bathroom of the Glass House in a very opaque brick cylinder.

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Note to my Chinese friends and family: Please don’t think I’m mocking. I’m not. There is nothing wrong with the bathrooms in China generally speaking. I admit that bathrooms in China really were funny to me as an American when I first came there, but I don’t call myself an authority on proper bathroom design. They were funny to me only because I was not used to them. When two cultures collide, there are bound to be some chuckles from both sides. I imagine that there is plenty of things that Chinese might think are funny about American life, and I will not begrudge you your laughter.