...eating pumpkin soup with matzo biscuits and vegetable and nut pate and goat's cheese and drinking herbal teas...
...the snow is falling as tiny crystals and it is blowing first east and then west and then east again in near darkness ...roofs of cars and of buildings and all flat surfaces are lightly covered in snow which turns everything outside into a black and white unity... while indoors i continue to read and to think of the perhaps gently imposed unity of the first three emperors of the Qing dynasty in China, appropriating, assimilating and integrating the Confucian, Buddhist, courtly, military, literary and artistic traditions of ancient China and Tibet with western technologies learnt from Jesuit missionaries... and i ask myself if these so powerful Manchu rulers (from Mongolia) were themselves eventually conquered by the native traditions?... were they, like the snow, to turn from a unifying covering into an invisible watering and cultivation of the diversities they ostensibly conquered and ruled?...
...and now rain has succeeded snow which is sliding off sloping roofs and windows in irregularly shaped pieces revealing and wetting the surfaces beneath...
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