This is the second book of a pair. In Bread of Wisdom, a guest from outside time visits thirteen people who spent their lives asking one question. The last of them was an old man who had called everything under the sun a breath — and who received bread from the guest's hands, and then found him gone.
This is his account of what happened next. He set out to find the guest again, and on that road he met thirteen more people: men and women who changed the world and were forgotten by it. I will post these meetings here, one at a time, as I translate them.
Prologue
No one knows my name. Many suppose I was a king. It is only a guess. I see no reason to tell them otherwise. My life was a breath, and a breath is not worth counting. I was only a man who gathered scattered things into one place.
I had everything a man can have. A great house. Gardens. Silver. And wisdom no one could match. At the end I learned what all of it was: a handful of breath that vanishes the moment you close your hand. The rivers run into the sea, and the sea is never full. The sun rises and sets and rises, and it is the same sun. The wise man dies as the fool dies, and both are forgotten alike. I saw this more honestly than anyone, and it left me alone.
I cannot forget that evening. At a small table by the road I sat across from a traveler, and we talked. At the end of it he broke bread and held it out to me, and I knew I had spent my whole life measuring only what lies under the sun. In the instant I understood it, he was gone from before my eyes, like mist.
I set out to find him again. A little more talk with him, I thought, and the bars of my doubt would swing open. But as the days of walking went on, something small had begun to change in me without my knowing. It was like a cloud no bigger than a hand, showing itself far off at the end of a long drought, so faint you could not be sure it was there.
I have not found him. But on the road where I looked for him, I met thirteen people I had not expected to meet. I thought it was chance. Looking back, it has the shape of something meant. People who changed the world and were forgotten by it. As I sat beside them and asked, and looked with them at what they had forgotten — out of that dry sky, the first thin threads of rain began to fall.
Now I will write down those thirteen meetings.
Chapter One — Bi Sheng
I followed the river until I came to a workshop. Rows of clay letters were drying on wooden boards, a joint of a finger each, thousands of them. The smell of earth came off the cooling kiln, and above it the smell of ink and paper. An old man was holding one dried letter up to a lamp.
"That is a great many letters," I said.
He did not look up. "It takes this many to print one book. But fire them once and you can use them for this book and the next. Pull them out, set them again, and you have a new book. Before, a whole book was carved into one block. One wrong character and the block was thrown away. I broke the words apart, letter by letter."
"Then every word in the world is born again, endlessly, out of your hands."
He looked at me for the first time. There was pride in his face, and beneath the pride something more tired. "Where the books printed with my letters have gone — across rivers, over mountains — I have no idea. I couldn't begin to count them."
"And did your name travel with them?"
His fingers stopped. It was a long moment before he laughed, low in his throat. "...No. A book carries the name of the one who wrote it, not the one who shaped the letters. I am in every book and in none of them."
He ran a fingertip over the dried clay.
"People say my letters do the work of remembering. The words of emperors, the writings of the old sages — they ride on my letters a thousand years. My letters forget nothing, not one stroke. But isn't it strange. These letters carry every name in the world, and the one name they never carried is the name of the hand that made them. I make memory, and memory has forgotten me."
"The words your letters carry," I asked. "Are they your words?"
He turned to look at me. The question seemed to touch something.
"...No. Not those either." He smiled, without much in it. "I shaped a vessel to carry other men's words. The letters are mine; what rides on them is not. I am the most invisible craftsman in the world. I carry the words of everyone a thousand miles, and I have not left behind a single word of my own. The thing I gave my life to has not kept one line of me."
I looked at the drying clay with him. I knew that feeling. I too had once had everything a man can have, and found the same thing at the end of it. What disappears the moment you close your hand. A handful of breath.
"You wonder what all that labor was meant to leave behind," I said.
"...I do," he said, like a man who had waited a long time for someone to ask. "The rivers run and run and never fill the sea, and I shape letter after letter and my hands are always empty. A man works this hard under the sun, and it all slips out when he tries to hold it. Even what I made is not mine."
"Let me ask you one thing," I said. "Of all the books printed with your letters, which one has gone the farthest from your hands?"
He thought for a moment. "I don't know. ...That is the heart of it. Once a book is printed and carried off, you never learn whose hands it falls into. Like a parent whose child has gone far away. No word of whether he is well, or who is with him." He looked down at his empty hands. "I shaped the letters, and the books those letters made are no longer mine. Perhaps somewhere far off my letters have changed the course of a man's life. And I will go back to the earth never knowing it."
He was quiet a long while, and then went on slowly, as if following words that were arriving on their own. "And yet it is strange. Knowing it is all for nothing, tomorrow I will shape more clay. Not to leave something behind. Just — I like that the words go farther. That my hands are empty and I still like the work. I don't understand it myself."
I did not answer. I could not. What he had said — that his hands were empty and he liked the work anyway — had touched something dry in me. All my life I had counted my hands as empty. And there in that workshop, for the first time, it crossed my mind that empty hands might not be empty after all.
When I left, Bi Sheng was picking up the next letter. I thought of that piece of dried clay, how it became part of him the moment he held it, and then became a book and crossed the river. Like breath. And yet the pages that breath had touched and turned into writing were open, even now, under some far-off lamp. With the maker's name nowhere on them.
I left him and walked on along the river. I was still on the road, still looking for the traveler who had broken bread and gone. But in that short while I had sat with Bi Sheng, the cloud no bigger than a hand, hanging at the far end of a long drought, seemed to have grown — only a little. Perhaps I had brushed past the one I was looking for in a place I never expected. Beside the dry hands of an old craftsman with no name.
Comments
Post a Comment