Resting, and reading more of this famous collection (selected from the vast extent of Chinese literature, one genre of which, The Complete T'ang Poems 'in its 900 sections, comprises over 48,000 shih poems by some 2,200 authors' in a single dynasty) I am inspired yet again, not only by quantity but by sensitive calm, and a prevailing (non-Western) humanism... as I read I feel this is something still new to me - in range and depth and confidence.

Michael Foale, who has lived for over a year in Russian and International space stations, spoke today of his certainty that people should and will visit, and eventually live on, space stations, the Moon, and Mars... But he is answering listeners' question (and dismissing dangers, doubts and difficulties) in a way that to me seems facile, characteristic of our materialistic thought at its weakest... Yet he has done brave and difficult things, even the repairing of the Hubble telescope during a space walk.

In the last moments before closing time I bought this immense book (a Christian utopia) with which I am already immensely inspired (though in earlier attempts I found it 'too religious').

Today I resolved, with the help of this book : 'to re-approach my Christian inheritance (discarded in my early twenties) and to re-think humanism, dualism, and unity'...

4. I've also been reading Nietzsche with some grasp, at last, of what he was doing in relation to Christianity and Western humanism:

to overcome the nihilistic devaluation of life and man which had followed the destruction of the metaphysical world ('the death of God')

[from R J Hollingdale's introduction to his translation of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a book for everyone and no one Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1971]

5. Sitting in a modest Chinese cafe (while reading G R Evans' introduction to City of God) I marked many of her remarks and quotations - here are a few of them:

...the sacking of Rome gave Augustine a reason to write City of God.

Augustine was called upon to explain the fact that God's enemies had not experienced a downfall.

There was also (as in all forms of dualism) a substantial mistrust of the body.

Even after he had accepted that the omnipotent Christian God was the creator of matter as well as spirit, Augustine continued to believe that, as a matter of common experience, the body and soul were at war in each individual.

Augustine's concern to keep the people of God together, to protect and defend them, is perhaps the governing principle of all this writing

Augustine explores his own motivation and processes of thought to a degree peculiarly his own

'The Heavenly City ... does not hesitate to obey the laws of the earthly city by which those things which are designed for the support of this mortal life are regulated' [City of God XIX 17]

Happiness, he finds, does not consist in heightened enjoyment but in a modest steadiness of spirit in a settled joy [City of God II 11]

Augustine's contention that there would have been no need for political structures , with their sanctions and strictures and enforcements, if it were not for the Fall... [City of God XIX 15]

...Augustine proposed a larger agenda. He encourages people to think big, to look up, beyond the advantage of the present moment, and to form the habit of setting what they do in the context of eternity.

All these quotations and remarks, besides inspiring me to reconsider Christianity and humanism, seem to not-quite-connect, to leave the future open to new thoughts, and actions, to continuities that were formerly impossible but now, with the prospect of network in place of city, they point to a new connectiveness, beyond that of dualistic thoughts of any kind, an integration of mind and nature.

For instance the absence of anything, in Michael Foale's replies, sufficient to anticipate and avoid exploitations and bad side-effects of space travel or to put first what is good, not what is technically possible.

And I did not mention 'the city' as a continuing idea that is being realised everywhere*. I was attracted to Augustine's descriptions of a heavenly city being realised (as the Christian Church) in the midst of the secular city but attuned to things godly...

*In the early 20th century one fifth of us lived in cities but soon (I read recently) four fifths will do so.

...this supposed presence of two cities, worldly and divine, seems now to call for integration. To 'discover the how of that' could be the purpose of these thoughts. Such an aim calls for devotion, but also care to avoid the perils of both idealism and materialism - or of harsh and insensitive ways of combining them, if such is possible. Without compulsion. Very difficult.

But now we are not only more numerous but publicly connected in a self-organising network that can spontaneously resist centralism as well as be mis-used to enforce it... is that where the most ancient humanism (calm despite disorders) that of Chinese literature and government, could warn and inspire us?...

...(The Dowager (who is addressing the Emperor) stands up, strides about, flings her arms violently, shrieks.)

(these pages are designed to be read with the window set to two-thirds of the screen width)