Tidbits.

* I've noticed something: cable television is great for insomnia. When you can't get to sleep, you might as well catch a showing of Tron.
* No matter how hard I try, I just cannot read all of my assigned Silk Road seminar readings in one shot. They have to be broken up, for my sanity's sake if for no other reason. It's not that I don't find the material fascinating. It's just that there's only so much a brain can take in a single sitting.
* The Big Pour event that I attended this weekend was a blast, but I've decided that I need to lay off the sauce for a bit. That was a whole lot of beer, and I'm not really a spring chicken anymore. That said, however, what a time. My friends totally rock!



Photo ©foxxydancr

How Much Can We Know?

I read through the last of this week's Silk Road readings this evening and completed the attendant assessment required as well. I was a little frayed on this reading, as it was a straight historiography paper and while they're often chock full of fascinating things they can be impressively tedious.

I perked up when the author began to elucidate the debates that cropped up over family structure in the eighth century. (These debates were structured around the superb cache of eighth century documents that have been held in the Shōsōin for more than a millennium.) I perked up even more when he began narrating the current thinking on the wages and conditions for copyists in this period.

What struck me so sharply, as I was reading about the speculations that have surrounded the Shōsōin documents, was a question I once asked a teacher of mine way back in the day. I asked if we had any way of knowing what life was like for those men and women of early Japan who were not in the aristocratic classes. The teacher responded that it wasn't really possible. Years later, I realize how shortsighted such a pronouncement was. There are things to be discovered about practically every aspect of these past civilizations, if we are diligent and discerning.

How much we can know depends on a variety of factors, naturally, but we can apparently know that lowly copyists worked ten and twelve-hour days, for slave wages and indifferent nutrition, with no hope of promotion, and with little sympathy from their masters in times of illness or bereavement.

I always expected it was so, but it's so awesome to know that there's a document out there that specifies that fact in black and white. And that someone found it, thought about it, and then shared it with the world.