Increased social activity – Sei Shonagon, the diarist par excellence – Under-reporting of COVID cases and deaths – Will Nepal undergo India’s fate? – Evening statistics
Social life has been resuming in the past week and promises to gain momentum. Two days ago SC visited me at my house and we had lunch together at a local restaurant. Yesterday I went to see DC and JC at their house, where we had breakfast together, then went on a stroll in Huntley Meadows Regional Park, and lunched upon returning to their house. All of us have been vaccinated, so we did not use facemasks. SC’s visit marked the first time that I have had a guest indoors other than a repairman or service provider of some sort. We tried walking together as well, but the rainy weather of two days ago cut that attempt short. It was sunny and clear yesterday, however, and DC, JC, and I enjoyed the scenery of Huntley Meadows. The park is the largest non-tidal wetland in the area, and a good part of the walkways consists of boardwalks, as the ground is too marshy to accommodate all but the most determined pedestrians otherwise. The vista around the marsh is open, affording many opportunities for bird-watchers; waterfowl such as herons and red-winged blackbirds are numerous. Frogs were continually croaking. In the woodlands that border the marsh, many of the trees have grown to an unusual height on account of the amount of water accessible by the roots, and in parts the scene is reminiscent of the Smokies in this respect.
DC and JC have both worked in the State Department. Because they are fluent in both Chinese and Japanese (and JC is from Taiwan originally), the greater part of their assignments abroad have been in East Asia. We spoke of current affairs in that region, but we also touched upon the literature of the two great East Asian cultures. In particular, we talked of Sei Shonagon, the foremost diarist of Japan in the Heian era; and that subject is not without relevance to journals such as these. As will be seen, she provides insight on how such diaries are written in the first place.
Sei Shonagon is not well-known in this country, but in Japan her diary has undergone a fate similar to that of George Eliot’s Silas Marner: that of being foisted upon high school students at a time when they are too young to appreciate it. There, however, the resemblance ends. A woman more different in character than George Eliot can scarcely be imagined.
Some background is necessary. In the Heian era, as the period following the establishment of Kyoto as the capital in 794 is known, the literature it produced has a peculiarity that, as far as I know, has not been duplicated in any other country or any other era: namely, that its most important authors are all women. The explanation given for this is that the men tended to write in a stilted would-be “classical” Chinese, just as in many European countries authors wrote in Latin before vernacular literatures were developed. The women, on the other hand, were restricted to their own language, in which authors naturally were more eloquent. Still, that is not the entire story. Unlike many other cultures in antiquity and, for that matter, unlike Japan itself in many later eras, literacy in women (among the upper classes) was expected and prized. Sei Shonagon writes of one gifted young woman whose father regarded her as a prodigy and encouraged her to become an expert about Japanese poetry – a literary scholar, in fact.
The most notable achievement of this flowering was The Tale of Genji, an extraordinary work, containing hundreds of characters portrayed with a psychological realism not at all usual until much more modern times. The novel features convoluted genealogy trees, in which there is never any discrepancy about the relationship of even the most obscure of these men and women to each other, and a completely consistent internal calendar that covers events over a period of decades. For the most part, however, the women authors wrote diaries rather than novels. “Diaries” is the term to use; they are not journals in the ordinary sense and do not record events on a day-to-day basis; but rather they concentrate on impressions of the moment as well as past recollections of various events that are written down without much regard for chronological order.
The majority of the diaries are heavily influenced by the Buddhist attitude of the transitory nature of pleasures and possessions, and an overwhelming number of them contain poems of a melancholy tone that sometimes appears formulaic. There can be no question, however, that many of the authors suffered greatly from ennui. The upper-class women of the period literally had nothing to do. Phrases such “suffering from leisure” or “relieving one’s leisure” frequently crop up in reference to them. The author of the “Gossamer Diary,” as it is generally translated, contains several passages complaining about the tedium of her life, of which the following is typical: “There is a slow drizzle. My direction today is unlucky and so I can expect no visitors. The world seems a dreary, cheerless place.” (Traveling in an unlucky direction was discouraged, and a direction could become unlucky on any given occasion, depending on the movements of various divinities, as interpreted by the priests.) The author of the Gossamer Diary, to be sure, was in a somewhat unfortunate position, being the neglected wife of a nobleman who had lost his love for her and had turned his attentions to other women; but most of the authors of the period display a kind of continual sighing and a sensation of lacrimae rerum (“the tears of things”).
Sei Shonagon, however, is the exception. She had many personal shortcomings, but a tendency towards passive depression was not one of them. It is quite startling, in the midst of descriptions of festivals and and ceremonies and customs that are by now thoroughly obscure, to encounter passages whose breezy freshness leaps out over the space of ten centuries:
“A preacher ought to be good-looking. If we are properly to understand the worthy sentiments of his sermon, we must keep our eyes fixed on him while he speaks; by looking away we may forget to listen. An ugly preacher may accordingly be a source of sin.”
Like many women of the Heian court, Sei Shonagon was quite promiscuous and experimented with a variety of partners. At one point she was linked with a certain Narinobu, but she lamented that he “has several other attachments, not to mention his wife, and he cannot visit very often.” To be sure, if one gets involved with a prominent official who has a crowded work schedule, I suppose his wife could be included among the unwelcome distractions that divert his attention from the important business of love-making. For this activity in general she displays what might be regarded as a typically Japanese concern about the etiquette with which it is conducted. She stresses, for example, the importance of the man making a suitable display of reluctance upon quitting the bedchamber on the morning afterwards:
“A woman’s attachment to a man depends largely on the elegance of his leave-taking. If he jumps out of bed, scurries about the room, tightly fastens his trouser-sash, rolls up the sleeves of his Court cloak, hunting costume, or whatnot, stuffs his belongings into the breast of his robe, and then briskly secures the outer sash – one really begins to hate him.”
Later commentators were shocked by her laxness in amatory matters, her readiness to make others less quick-witted than herself (i.e., nearly everyone she met) the butt of her jokes, and her complete indifference to the disadvantaged living conditions of anyone of a lower rank than herself. It was they who spread the rumor that she died in lonely and impoverished old age; but in absence of first-hand evidence this sounds like a pious fancy. To judge by the diary itself, she was well-qualified to look after her own interests. She was on excellent terms with the Empress, and at the same time she contrived to be good friends with the Empress’s uncle, who represented the main rival to the Empress’s own father for the position of the power behind the throne. On occasion some of the other courtiers made deliberate attempts to embarrass her in public, but she managed, thanks to her coruscating wit, to escape scot-free nearly every time.
In the last entry she describes how she acquired several notebooks of good-quality paper from the Empress (it was a commodity in short supply even at the Court). With this stock of writing material on hand,
“I wrote these notes at home, when I had a good deal of time to myself and thought no one would notice what I was doing. Everything that I have seen and felt is included. Since much of it might appear malicious and even harmful to other people, I was careful to keep my book hidden. . . . I set about filling the notebooks with odd facts, stories from the past, and all sorts of other things, including the most trivial material. On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects.’
It’s an accurate description of the diary as a whole. Sei Shonagon migrates from topic to topic as the fancy takes her, sometimes recounting recent events, sometimes recollecting episodes from the past, sometimes making observations on natural history (the first entry, for instance, discusses which portion of the day is the most beautiful in each of the four seasons), sometimes making observations about social behavior, sometimes sketching the characters of people she knows, sometimes simply compiling lists (“Hateful Things”, “Elegant Things”, “Things That Are Distant Though Near”, “Things That Are Near Though Distant”, etc.). It seems quite random at times, and yet as one progresses through the various entries, a vivid picture of life in the Heian court emerges. It is indeed one of the most important historical documents of the age, although she had no such intention while writing it.
I can’t quite equal her claim; this journal certainly does not include everything I have seen and felt. I have dwelt a good deal less, for instance, on personalities – necessarily, since for the past year I have spent the greater part of my time alone. But I have tried to divert my mind in these entries from dwelling on the COVID virus exclusively and to focus on occasion on other matters. Observations on “trees and plants, birds and insects” also obtrude; I have the advantage of Sei Shonagon here, who like the ladies of the court in general, rarely ventured outside except on specific occasions to view cherry blossoms or to hear the song of a bird related to the nightingale. My descriptions are not as good, but they are somewhat more varied. And, like her, I had a good deal of time to myself, thanks to the restrictions imposed upon me by the pandemic. Perhaps, also, some of the entries may appear malicious, at any rate to certain public figures. Some of the material will be trivial to critical minds. To those who make that charge I can only echo her own words: “After all, it is written entirely for my amusement and I put things down exactly as they came to me.”
The virus, of course, is still to be reckoned with. On occasion I have referred to the probabilities of COVID-related deaths being under-reported in several countries, including our own. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) appears to agree. A few days ago it published a new study that estimates the death toll in the U.S. from the pandemic is over 900,000, a figure 57% higher than the official amount. The global death toll, similarly, is estimated to be close to 7 million instead of 3.68 million. As these figures suggest, under-reporting may be even worse in other countries than it is here. The government of Mexico has already admitted in late March that its figures are under-reported by at least 60%. India and Russia both have similar undercounts, with death tolls under-reported by 400,000 apiece. The incidence rates of nations such as Japan, Egypt, and various Central Asian countries may be under-reported by a factor of 10. National pride is not the only reason for under-reporting. It can be difficult to track down the data, particularly in Third World nations, where registration of deaths can be uncertain.
Not everyone in the scientific community agrees with this study. Other studies have confirmed that the number of excess deaths here and in other nations has exceeded the official count of COVID-related deaths, but that does not necessarily mean that all of these can be accounted for by COVID. Sometimes the causes of death may be indirect: for example, the pandemic fueled a surge in the use of opioids, which in turn led to a greater number of overdose deaths. Again, the strain on hospital systems in beleaguered nations such as India has led to deaths of patients suffering from other diseases that under normal circumstances could have been avoidable.
Nepal, like India, is undergoing a frightening increase in COVID cases and deaths. The country’s population is about 30 million. Case rates have increased from 100 per day in March to more than 8000. Nepal has only about 1600 intensive care beds and fewer than 600 ventilators for its entire population. There are 0.7 doctors per 100,000 people, as compared with 0.9 doctors per 100,000 in India. The situation is aggravated by the porous border it shares with India. Nepalis are not required to show their passport or ID card to enter their country; and since many Nepali people have businesses in India and many Indians have businesses in Nepal, cross-border traffic is high. In recent weeks, some Indians have fled their country’s second wave, hoping to access health care in Nepal or simply to escape to another country,
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 157,523,926; # of deaths worldwide: 3,283,183; # of cases U.S.: 33,416,915; # of deaths; U.S.: 594,895.