Tea world

I had some recourse to the books’ indices; it was no great effort to look up “sex” and “homosexuality” and “Bruce” and “Dera’a”. But I also did some page-turning looking for things stuck in the back of my brain from having read this stuff. For example (pardon the inside baseball), none of the sex-related index entries were for the Farraj-and-Daud story (so sad, and so finely written). I dug it up by plowing through the wonderful chapter summaries Lawrence supplied for the Seven Pillars Subscribers’ Edition front matter, reproduced in the 1935 First Edition, and was delighted to find that he had indexed it under “Sex” even if all the subsequent students hadn’t.

Since these books refer to each other and all refer back to Seven Pillars, you end up having to look, in close succession, at the index, the primary text, and the notes to the text, which requires a half-dozen active bookmarks (tall thin pieces of paper, remember those?) in three or four books at once.

When I lost my patience at the ignorant ham-handed editing of that Wikipedia subsection, I hadn’t realized I was letting myself in for three solid evenings of what used to be, pre-search-engine, a primary occupation of serious scholars of, well, anything.

But you know, the Internet helped too. There were a few key phrases I remembered but which had come unhooked from their sources in the ramshackle extrusions of my overcrowded memory. Google could solve the problem of hooking the phrase to the book-title, and then I was off to the scholarly races. And the Net led me to Yagitani’s magnificently-obsessive An 'S.A.' Mystery.

Also, I discovered that the text of Seven Pillars is available at Project Gutenberg Australia. So I had my computer do some brute-force scanning to reduce the chances of I or any of my fellow-scholars having missed anything important.

With time, more and more of these source texts will migrate online, and it seems obvious (can this be controversial?) that the quality of scholarship will thereby improve. It does trouble me a little that the next time anyone is dissatisfied with what they’re reading about T.E. Lawrence’s sexuality, the nearest search engine will lead them quickly to my work, and they may be satisfied with that, and never cast their eyes over any of these aged beautiful pages.

今日は久しぶりに、なんでもない話をします。クリスマスイブですね。

わたしは、一年の中でこの季節が一番好きです。空気がつーんと冷たくてクリアで、すべてがよく見えて、そしてすべて新しくスタートできそうな気がして。

そこでちょっと哲学的な話を。

どんなことにも理由はあると思う。今住んでいる国、場所、家、仕事している環境、家族... 偶然だとか成り行きだとか、だから仕方ない、自分では変えられないって思っていることがいっぱいあるよね。でも、本当に変えられないのか？と、自分に聞いてみる。何度も何度も聞いてみる。すぐに答えが出ないときは、その問いを胸にとどめておいて、何か刺激があるたびに、問い直してみる。そして、変えられるものは変えていき、変えられないものは自分の中で整理して納得して前に進む。。。。今年は、そんな一年でした。

変えられるものを変える勇気、変えられないものを受け入れる力、そしてそれらを見分ける知恵 ... これは、わたしにとって永遠のテーマだと感じています。

たくさんの変化の中で、それらを追いかけているだけでは、いつも被害者になってしまうよね。でも、こんな場合はこうしようって作戦をたてて、自分が先頭にたっていけば、主導権を持つことができる。そう思って、いろんなことにチャレンジしてきました。でも、今年は自分の力では変えられないことが多かったーーー。。。(と思いませんか?)

とはいえ、その中でも、たくさんの作戦をたて、選択をしてきているのです。知らないうちに。今、ここにいてこのブログを書いていることも、わたしの選択。だから自信を持って進んでいこうと思います。来年も、がんばるぞー！ Open Source Conference 2009 Tokyo/Spring にも、出るぞー! そのころの私は、どんなふうになっているでしょう。2 月末です。すぐそこだけど、とっても遠い。

ではみなさん、メリークリスマス！そしてよいお年を。来年もよろしくお願いします。

English:

I will not talk about Translation today, and talk about "nothing" but personal. It's a Christmas Eve today!

I like this season the best in a year. Very cold, clear air, and everybody looks happy. It makes me feel I can see everything clearly and I can start everything from a scratch in a new year.

I'll talk something spiritual today.

I believe everything has a reason to be there. Where we live, what we do for living, family, friends... everything seems to happen by coincidence or seems to be unavoidable. But I know there's a reason why we chose it. Yes, we chose it before or after we were born. We are making decisions while we are not aware.

I often ask myself "Is that what you want? If not, can you change it ?" I cannot answer sometime, then, keep that question in my mind and take any chance and ask again. If the answer is yes, I change it. If not, I manage myself to accept it. Never avoid looking at the fact, and try my best to deal with it. That's the way I lived this year.

Grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other - this is my life-time goal.

I want to find myself in the driving seat of my life. I may not be able to stop the big wave is coming, but I can prepare myself to live over the wave. I do not want to be a victim of the fate. ... but, this year, there