aerasio

Chi Po and the Sorcerer

Chi Po lived in a province full of mountains, grass, weather, and people. It lay deep in China, far from the sea, a little south of where it might have been, and all in all a little west of where it was. Chi Po was eleven years old, and he went to school because there was no remedy for it. But the schoolmaster always kept a branch or a flower on his desk—plum blossoms in the winter, a peony in the spring, a lotus in the summer, and a chrysanthemum in the fall—and this consoled Chi Po for having to memorize the classics. He would stare and stare at the peony, and count its petals, and wonder about having such a fine glob of color right under the blackboard.
“Subjunctives, children, are the preserve of the aristocracy and villagers must not meddle with them,” said the teacher. He also told them that if anyone in the school could draw, or make, a cube, one side of which was wider and longer than the other five, that youngster was destined to become emperor, even if a girl. All the same, Chi Po kept staring at the flower until his eyes became round, and then he would start and ask himself: “Am I watching the peony, or is the peony watching me?”
The teacher noticed this, of course, and he sometimes thought that really he ought to take the flowers away, but he almost preferred his flowers to Chi Po, and besides, he had twenty-two other students who were gratifyingly spellbound by his discourses on geometry and The Book of Mutations. So the flowers remained on the desk, and the soul of Chi Po buzzed about them like an ignorant bumblebee.


From "Chi Po and the Sorcerer" by Oscar Mandel

So said Aerasio at 10:27