Authors: Eric Weiner
We don’t often question the rationale for specialization. “Of course there was less specialization back then,” a friend said at a dinner party. “The world was less complicated.” Yes, it was. But I would argue that the world was less complicated
because
there was less specialization. The specialist is encouraged, rewarded, for parsing his chosen field into smaller and smaller morsels, then building high walls around those tiny bits. A narrow outlook naturally follows.
We mourn the death of the Renaissance man, oblivious to the blindingly obvious fact that we killed him and continue to do so every day on college campuses and in corporate offices across the land.
Writing a book is a creative act. So is reading one. Yet both acts pale in comparison to the resourcefulness required to procure a rare manuscript from ancient China. I am forced to deploy my best groveling skills to get my hands on one book, an important piece of the Chinese puzzle.
It was written by Shen Kuo, an eleventh-century genius who made important contributions to many fields but is perhaps best known for his work on the magnetic compass. Shen was a Chinese Leonardo da Vinci and, like Leonardo, jotted his sundry and brilliant thoughts in notebooks.
Shen’s notebooks were lost for centuries, eventually recovered, and only recently translated into English.
Finding a copy, though, has not been easy. At first, this annoys me. We live in a world where anything—certainly any book—is only a click away. Then I take a deep breath and get some perspective. This is not the way it was for most of human history. Books were prized possessions—treasures, metaphorically
and
literally. You had to sweat to get your hands on one, so the moment when your fingers caressed its pages for the first time was that much sweeter.
Shen Kuo’s book is called
Brush Talks from Dream Brook
, and I am determined to find a copy, propelled by the tantalizing title and a fierce desire to know this Chinese Leonardo. I plead with friends, and friends of friends, and with complete strangers. My efforts pay off, and a librarian named Norman (at least that is his anglicized name) delivers the goods to my hotel, with all of the furtive intrigue of a drug deal or CIA drop.
The two volumes are heavy in my arms. I stare at them in quiet delight and disbelief, as if they were visitors from another world. I’m eager to dive in, but this is not the sort of text one devours in a pre-caffeinated state, and as much as I have grown fond of the genius tea of Hangzhou, sometimes only coffee will do.
I head to a nearby coffeehouse that had caught my eye. Called Hanyan, it is nestled between a clutch of art galleries and antique shops. Perfect.
I sit down, order my coffee, and am surprised to find Uma Thurman staring at me. She is smoking a cigarette, splayed across a leather sofa, looking oh-so-cool
Pulp Fiction.
Later, in the restroom, I find Robert De Niro,
Taxi Driver
De Niro, checking me out. Electric guitars and traditional Yunnan instruments—guitarlike themselves—hang from the walls, alongside wooden puppets and vinyl LPs. Thankfully, the brash visuals are offset by mellow acoustics—smooth jazz, the faint hum of an espresso machine, the pleasant chortle of incomprehensible Chinese—creating a net effect that is surprisingly tranquil.
So it is here, in this unexpected serenity, where I crack open
Brush Talks from Dream Brook
(vol. 1) for the first time. I hesitate, pausing to
ponder the small miracle that is the book. For two hundred years after Shen’s death, the lone copy languished somewhere. In 1305, a few copies were printed and fell into the hands of private collectors. The trail then goes cold—for more than six hundred years—until the 1940s, when a renowned book collector, Chen Chengzhong, hand-carried a copy, most likely the only surviving copy, to Hong Kong. There, a bibliophile named Hu Daojing spent his entire career compiling and proofreading the book, rendering it into modern Chinese and, eventually, the English edition I am now holding in my hands.
I open the book, taking time to gauge its heft in my hands, to feel the crook of its knobby spine, the smooth finish of the pages. I turn to an illustration of Shen. He is wearing the traditional silk robes of the time and an angular black hat. He’s sporting the requisite chiseled beard and droopy Fu Manchu mustache and is staring off into the distance, as if something incredibly interesting has caught his attention. A faint smile crosses his lips. He looks likable enough, but I can’t say I get any real sense of the man. For that, I’ll need to dig deeper.
I don’t know if they had business cards back then, but if they did, Shen’s must have been enormous. He was a mathematician, astronomer, meteorologist, geologist, zoologist, botanist, pharmacologist, agronomist, archaeologist, ethnographer, cartographer, encyclopedist, diplomat, hydraulic engineer, inventor, university chancellor, and finance minister. And those were only his day jobs! In his spare time, he wrote poetry and composed music. He was the first to identify the marine origins of certain rocks and fossils. He produced the world’s first topographical map. He was the first to observe the process of sedimentation. He theorized (correctly) that climates shifted gradually over time. Perhaps his greatest contribution was his observation that a magnetic needle will point toward the poles, though not directly. It’s always off by a few degrees, with the deviation increasing as you get closer to the north or south pole. Called magnetic declination, it’s a discovery that Christopher Columbus wouldn’t make for another four hundred years, and one that to this day is crucial for successful navigation. No wonder Joseph Needham called Shen Kuo “perhaps the most interesting character in all of Chinese scientific history.”
For much of history, Shen was known (if he was known at all) as a poet. Only later, thanks to Needham, was he recognized for his scientific discoveries. This is not unusual. The reputations of geniuses ebb and flow, moving up and down in relative standing but also in the domain for which we honor them. Goethe was proudest of his scientific work but today is remembered far more as a literary figure. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle thought of himself as a writer of serious historical fiction, yet is remembered for his Sherlock Holmes series.
As a youngster, Shen’s big break came when he aced the most difficult exam of the day. Called the
jinshii
, it required mastering a dozen Confucian classics. These exams, today dreaded by Chinese students, actually represented a major advance at the time and help explain the golden age. The aim was to replace a nepotistic system with a meritocracy, and for a while at least, it worked. No longer could you get ahead just because you had a powerful father or uncle. You had to earn your government position.
Competition was fierce. The top candidates, a select few, took the final exam at the Imperial Palace. Elaborate precautions were taken to weed out cheaters. Every entrant was carefully searched before taking the exam, their papers assigned numbers instead of names, and their completed exams copied to prevent judges from recognizing the applicant’s calligraphy.
Shen’s academics may have been stellar, but his personal life was a mess. He was unhappily married. His wife is said to have beat him. Like many creative geniuses, he channeled his discontent into his work. The year 1075 was his most miserable personally but his most productive professionally, his annus mirabilis, or “year of miracles.” That year he made his discovery about the properties of a magnetized needle.
I read more about Shen Kuo and smile, as once again the centuries, and the miles, shrink. Like Thucydides, Shen was exiled, dispatched to a far-flung outpost of the empire, after he misread the political winds and trumped-up charges were leveled against him. As I learned in Athens, rejection can stoke creative genius, at least among the more independent-minded among us.
That’s exactly what happened with Shen. Disgraced and forgotten, he settled on his farm in the village of Runzhou. He called the place Dream Brook because it reminded him of the idyllic countryside that had appeared to him in childhood dreams. There, resigned to his solitude, he wrote his masterpiece,
Brush Talks
.
I turn the page and immediately discover that this is a book with no narrative, no story line, no overarching theme. In this sense, it reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous notebook, the
Codex Leicester
, now resting comfortably in Bill Gates’s study. (Gates paid $30.8 million for it in 1994.) Like the
Codex
, Shen’s book is a collection of random thoughts, observations, ramblings, and digressions, a porthole into the workings of a restless and brilliant mind.
The book is divided into 609 numbered entries, ranging in length from a single sentence to a full page. The titles hint at the breadth of Shen’s interests. One is called “Words Used in Tortoise Shell Divination.” Another: “A Rich Idiot.” Then there is the intriguing “Autopsy via Red Light.”
Shen isn’t always likable in these pages. He could be a nitpicker—witness the cloying entry called “Errors Found in Books”—but more often he is bighearted and spot-on, as in “Enjoying the Things One Makes for Others” and “The Same Kindness Repaid with Different Outcomes.” Plenty of common sense is also in these pages, such as “medical knowledge cannot only be gained from books,” as well as the observation that “in this world, things do not often go as we expect.” You have no idea, Shen, no idea.
Shen possessed many talents but, ultimately, I think his was the genius of observation. Not any kind of observation, mind you, but the kind that leads to instantaneous insight—what author Robert Grudin calls “the beauty of sudden seeing.” His was the kind of observation Charles Darwin had in mind when he warned, “It is a fatal fault to reason whilst observing.” Darwin advocated observation unencumbered by assumptions and expectations.
See what is before you, the thing itself. Analyze later.
Every great discovery, every world-changing invention, every bold
theorem, began with this simple act of observation. The genius looks at what everyone else is looking at and sees something different. The world sees another Viennese housewife suffering from hysteria; Freud sees the inklings of something more profound. The world sees two unrelated species of finches; Darwin sees a connection, and a possible explanation for how humans progressed. The grand theories—of the unconscious and of evolution, respectively—would come later, but already their seeds had been planted through simple observation.
Only, of course, it is not so simple. We acclimate to our environment so we no longer see it. Creative people are able to avoid this deadening of perception and “make the familiar strange.”
Consider the case of William Harvey. Harvey was a physician living in early seventeenth-century England. People thought then that blood flowed from heart to body in much the same way as the tides surge in and out of the sea. Harvey believed this, too, until one day he observed a fish’s heart, still beating after it had been exposed. The beating heart reminded Harvey of a pump he had once seen, and he postulated, correctly, that our hearts also act as pumps. He was able to do this because he had “made the familiar strange,” writes inventor and psychologist William Gordon, in the
Journal of Creative Behavior.
It’s a skill, he says, that all creative people possess.
For someone who accomplished so much, Shen doesn’t get much respect, not even in his homeland. When I mention my interest in him, people either look at me blankly, or wonder why I would bother chasing this relative unknown. I’m not sure why he isn’t better known. Perhaps it’s because Shen was primarily a scientist during an era best known for its painting and poetry. Perhaps it’s because he was not much of a self-promoter.
Shen, though, wouldn’t mind his lack of notoriety. A modest man, he lived at a time when that virtue was honored. This deep and abiding humility lies at the heart of Chinese genius, in its ideal form, and explains why some of the most important Chinese classics remain anonymous, as do the greatest inventors. We may not know their names, but, says sinologist F. W. Mote, they live on “in bridges and towers, city walls and tombs,
canals with their locks and dams, hulls of sunken ships—in the countless artifacts of ordinary life.”
My goldfish is giving me funny looks. That is, if it is my goldfish. I’m not so sure. He seems to have put on a few ounces and has this little mark above one eye that I hadn’t noticed before. Does housekeeping change the fish the way they change the sheets? I worry I might be losing my already tenuous grip on reality. Travel can be enlightening but also disorienting. Unsettling. Fortunately, the Crystal Orange provides not only a goldfish for my viewing pleasure but also fourteen channels of television. Ah, yes, I think, the universal narcotic, and reach for the remote. This particular television, though, is not my drug of choice. Every channel, without exception, is tuned to CCTV, the state-run broadcaster.
It’s either that or stare at a goldfish with an attitude problem. I tune in to the middle of a heated discussion about Needham’s Grand Question or, as it’s known today, the “innovation gap.” This is the source of much hand-wringing. Everything is made in China but nothing is invented here.
“Why is that?” asks the presenter in perfect, clipped British English. “China has the talent pool, it has the resources.” She furrows her brow. “What else does it need?”
There is a long silence from the distinguished panel.
Say something,
I shout at the TV, no doubt startling Gary the Goldfish. (I’ve decided to give him a name, hoping that might appease him.) Finally, one of the panelists speaks up: “More time.” The other panelists harrumph in agreement. Yes, China needs more time. Also, they say, the government needs to get involved. It needs to “build” innovation the way it built bridges and dams and high-speed rail networks. More harrumphing from the panel, with everyone skirting the obvious fact staring them in the face like an oncoming bullet train: mandating innovation is an oxymoron, maybe not as absurd as “scheduling spontaneity,” but perilously close.