`Distant Plangencies'

My 8-year-old and I, as usual, arrived at his school too early so we sat on the floor outside his classroom, reading and waiting for the teacher. Michael had finished rereading one Harry Potter novel in the car and brought along another, as he put it, “for backup.” I, too, was rereading: Guy Davenport’s “Ernst Machs Max Ernst,” in The Geography of the Imagination.

After a few minutes, another kid sat beside me, pulled a book from his backpack, opened it in his lap and started to read. I couldn’t see the cover but it appeared to be an adult book from the public library. Another boy, one I already knew to be a Harry Potter enthusiast, walked up to Michael, thrust out his arm and cast a flamboyant spell. Michael responded in kind and it turned into a spell-casting version of a jazz “cutting contest” – two adepts trying to outdo each other – though they soon exhausted their repertoire of spells and were reduced to almost, but not quite, hitting each other with spell-casting gestures.

Out of nowhere, the first kid, the one reading the adult library book, exploded with a Potter spell of his own and vaporized the other two, or something. He smiled and went back to his book. I asked what he was reading.

“Chinese history,” he said.

I asked to see his book: The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han by Mark Edward Lewis (Harvard University Press, 2007). I asked why he was reading it and he shrugged and answered like a true booklover:

“I like it. I like Chinese history.”

Obviously, he wasn’t fooling. I returned the book and he effortlessly re-entered it. Here was an 8-year-old Chinese-American kid who already knows more about Chinese history than I will ever know. And he finds time for Harry Potter.

In the second-to-last paragraph of “Ernst Machs Max Ernst” (and of The Geography of the Imagination), Davenport writes:

“If I have a sensibility distinct from that of my neighbors, it is simply a taste, wholly artificial and imaginary, for distant plangencies and different harmonies in which I can recognize as a stranger a sympathy I could not appreciate at my elbow: songs of the Fulani, a ntumpan, male and female, of ceremonial elephant drums of the Asantehene, dressed in silk, under a more generous sun and crowding closer upon the symbolled and archaic embroidery of the skirts of God, the conversations of Ernst Mach and William James, Basho on the road to the red forests of the North, Sir Walter Scott at dinner with Mr. Hinze, his cat, sitting by his plate.”

The world is both bigger and smaller than we suspected, stranger and more familiar, so we might as well make ourselves at home. Elsewhere in his essay Davenport writes:

“The self, in any case, is a vacuum: nothing until it is filled. Continuity of perception, Mach said, is all we can call mind.”