,445,291,400,400,arial,12,4,0,0,5_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
We will try and respond to your request as soon as reasonably practical. When you receive the information, if you think any of it is wrong or out of date, you can ask us to change or delete it for you. Edited by Brigid Hains. I stepped into the dark of the ramshackle hillside temple. It was a hot day, and the climb had been steep. There were no other tourists around. The only people I passed on my way up the mountainside steps were two pious old ladies, pausing to catch their breath as they struggled through the afternoon heat. Inside it was cool, the air fragrant with incense.
The Message of Fatima
To one side of the door was a table, and behind the table sat a small, neat man in the robes of a Daoist priest. A handwritten sign in front of him announced that temple entrance was two yuan 20p. I paid my fee and he smiled. I peered into the dark, where deities and mythological beasts clamoured for attention on the painted walls. I had visited other temples elsewhere in China, in larger cities such as Beijing, Guangzhou and Wuhan; but there I had blended in among the hopeful devotees and noisy tourists.
Here, on the other hand, I was on my own, and felt somehow out of place, unsure how to conduct myself. The priest, however, was in a chatty mood. I had heard the old joke several times now. When foreigners come to China for a month or two, they go home and write a book. When they have been there for several months more, they write an article. If they have lived in China for more than a year, they end up writing nothing. I was in China for only a couple of months.
I hesitated about what to say, then I decided I might as well tell him. I was in China in pursuit of an obsession that, among certain of my more sober-minded and rational friends, was the cause of some alarm. For the previous few years, I had been increasingly preoccupied by that strangest of books, the Chinese Book of Changes or I Ching. In the West, the I Ching is mainly known as a divination manual, found on shelves alongside books about tarot cards, crystal healing, reiki, and contacting your angels, a part of the wild carnival of spurious notions that is New Age spirituality, that great tide of unreason against which the prophets of scientific rationality protest in vain.
I knew the arguments against the I Ching: I had heard these arguments many times, and they made sense to me; and yet there was something about the I Ching that continued to fascinate me, something that — the more I studied it — could not allow me to dismiss this book so lightly. My interest in the I Ching had begun several years before, neither as a fascination with Chinese culture, nor as a mystical concern with divinatory practices, but instead in the course of a rambling and idle conversation with a friend.
It was , and I was casting around for a fresh writing project. My first novel was due out in the following year. I wanted something new and substantial to work on, but I had no clear sense of direction. At some point during our conversation, we found ourselves talking about the taste for astrology, tarot cards and other forms of prognostication.
I was happily pouring scorn on these practices, protesting at their unreason, when my friend interrupted me. I was momentarily silenced. Then the conversation moved on, but the thought stuck with me. I was in need of new possibilities. So, a few days later, I went to the bookshop, made my way to the Mind, Body and Spirit section, and tentatively picked up a copy of the I Ching: I had come across the I Ching numerous times before on the bookshelves of friends, and had even tried to read it on occasion, but always given up, frustrated by the thickets of obscurity it presented.
As I stood in the bookshop flicking through the I Ching , my knowledge of the book was fairly rudimentary. I knew that each of the hexagrams was associated with a number of prognostications, and that the book was often put to use by tossing coins or sorting yarrow stalks, to randomly derive a hexagram made up of broken and unbroken lines. There was a pleasing mathematical completeness to this series of symbols.
2012 phenomenon
Six-lined figures, with each line in one of two states, meaning that there were two to the power of six possibilities in all, or Associated with these hexagrams were divinatory statements that were often astonishingly obscure and laconic: It furthers one to see the great man… When there is hoarfrost underfoot, solid ice is not far off… Bites through tender meat, so that his nose disappears… The wild goose gradually draws near the tree. Perhaps it will find a flat branch.
In the weeks and months that followed, I started getting to know the I Ching better. As I did so, I slowly pieced together the strange tale of its place in history: It was in this way that I found myself becoming a diviner. A couple of days after getting the book home, for the very first time I took three coins — twopence pieces seemed to be suitably unostentatious — formulated a question, and went about the ritual of casting my first hexagram on the basis of each toss of the coins, thus putting my foot on the slippery slope that would lead first to learning Chinese and, eventually, almost inevitably, to China.
M y relationship with the I Ching was complex from the very beginning. Meanwhile, on the internet, whole armies of crazies advanced their theories about the book: And when I read these things, I found myself thinking of the 20th-century British Sinologist Joseph Needham, who said that the I Ching was nothing more than a massive filing system for pigeonholing novelty and then doing nothing more about it.
The I Ching seemed to adapt to any purpose whatsoever. I felt myself descending into a realm of unfettered lunacy, stumbling across increasingly bizarre claims made on behalf of the I Ching ; and yet on the other hand the book seemed, bafflingly, to work. I divined for new hexagrams and new stories, tossing coins or sorting yarrow stalks, sat at my desk with a stick of incense burning, and the longer I did so, the more the stories continued to multiply.
I was caught between profound unease at the sheer unreason of what I was doing, and the fact that the I Ching so often bore rich fruit in new thoughts, ideas and images. So, in , I travelled to China to get to the bottom of things. There, covering thousands of miles by train and bus, I set about trying to establish once and for all what this book was about.
In Tianshui, I made offerings in the temple of Fuxi, the legendary originator of the I Ching ; in Shandong and Hong Kong, I spent time discussing divination practices with philosophers; between Beijing and Guangzhou, I endured an uncomfortable hour train journey in the company of a deranged tattooed diviner who talked the entire time; and along the way, I accumulated books and articles that I sent home in large, unwieldy packages.
It was towards the end of my trip that I found myself in the company of the friendly Daoist priest in that hillside temple, and there the thought came to me: I began to wonder if attempting to understand the I Ching in terms of understanding the I Ching was to risk misunderstanding the I Ching. The priest pushed his entrance-fee sign to one side, opened a drawer and took out a notebook, tearing off a page. He took a biro from his pocket and smiled at me.
Then he started an impromptu lecture. As he talked, he scribbled complex diagrams and notes on the page. He told me about Fuxi, about hexagrams and their constituent three-line trigrams, about the pole star and astrology, about philosophy and metaphysics, about the Hetu or the River Map, which explains the relationship between the eight trigrams, and about the wuxing or five phases of wood, fire, earth, metal and water, and its relationship to the numerological magic square known as the Luoshu , or Luo River Book.
I leant forwards, occasionally asking him to repeat something, trying to look intelligent; but very quickly I found myself lost in thickets of philosophical and linguistic difficulty. I had read about all this stuff countless times, but I have never had the kind of mind that could keep track of complexity. This makes me a poor student of esoterica. As the lecture proceeded, a crowd started to gather, because in the most populous nation on earth, crowds are easily summoned. The two old ladies whom I had passed on my way up the hill now stepped into the cool of the temple and grinned wildly to see the foreigner talking with the priest.
Navigation menu
A family appeared from somewhere or other, the children peering at me in fascination. Three or four others also congregated behind me. As the priest continued to scribble various astral configurations and hexagrams and mystical diagrams, all annotated in a spidery handwritten Chinese, a debate began to take hold among the onlookers. But I heard him speak Chinese! Yes, it's set in the future, there's interstellar travel, people shoot each other with blasters instead of pistols and so on. But these are superficial details, playing a fairly minor part in the story.
The Foundation novels are about society, not gadgets — and unlike, say, William Gibson's cyberpunk novels, which are excellent in a very different way, they're about societies that don't seem much affected by technological progress. Asimov's Galactic Empire sounds an awful lot like the Roman Empire. Trantor, the empire's capital, comes across as a sort of hyper-version of Manhattan in the s.
The Foundation itself seems to recapitulate a fair bit of American history, passing through Boss Tweed politics and Robber Baron-style plutocracy; by the end of the trilogy it has evolved into something resembling mid 20th-century America — although Asimov makes it clear that this is by no means its final state. Let me be clear, however: On the contrary, this familiarity, the way Asimov's invented societies recapitulate historical models, goes right along with his underlying conceit: That conceit underlies the whole story arc.
In Foundation, we learn that a small group of mathematicians have developed "psychohistory", the aforementioned rigorous science of society. Applying that science to the all-powerful Galactic Empire in which they live, they discover that it is in fact in terminal decline, and that a 30,year era of barbarism will follow its fall. But they also discover that a carefully designed nudge can change that path. The empire can't be saved, but the length of the coming dark age can be reduced to a mere millennium. The novels follow the unfolding of that plan.
For the first book and a half — Foundation and the first half of Foundation and Empire — all goes well. Then the plot takes a swerve, as the plan goes off course, only to be put back on track by the mysterious Second Foundation in the eponymous third novel. Described that way, the story can sound arid and didactic. And the truth is that if you're looking for richly nuanced character development, you should go read Anna Karenina. Asimov was actually better than many science-fiction authors at creating interesting individuals — as a teenager I had a crush on Arkady Darell, the firecracker teenaged sort-of heroine of the trilogy's conclusion — but that's not saying much.
For that matter, you'll also be disappointed if you're looking for shoot-em-up action scenes, in which Han Solo and Luke Skywalker destroy the Death Star in the nick of time.
There's only one brief description of a space battle — and the true purpose of the battle, we learn, is not the defeat of an ultimately trivial enemy but the creation of a state of mind that serves the Plan. There is, to be fair, one scene in which the fate of the galaxy hinges on the quick action of a hero or actually heroine — Bayta Darell, at the end of Foundation and Empire.
But even then it's not conventional action writing: Bayta saves the day at the very last minute by shooting one of the good guys. Yet despite their lack of conventional cliffhangers and, for the most part, either heroes or villains, the Foundation novels are deeply thrilling — suspenseful, engrossing, and, if I may say, bracingly cynical.
For the absence of conventional cliffhangers doesn't mean an absence of unconventional cliffhangers. In the first book-and-a-half there are a series of moments in which the fate of the galaxy seems to hang in the balance, as the Foundation faces the apparent threat of extinction at the hands of barbarian kings, regional warlords, and eventually the decaying but still powerful empire itself.
Each of these crises is met by the men of the hour, whose bravery and cunning seem to offer the only hope. Each time, the Foundation triumphs. But here's the trick: Each time, just to drive the point home, the image of Hari Seldon, recorded centuries before, appears in the Time Vault to explain to everyone what just happened. The barbarians were never going to prevail, because the Foundation's superior technology, packaged as religion, gave it the ability to play them off against each other. The warlord's weapons were no match for the Foundation's economic clout.
This unique plot structure creates an ironic resonance between the Foundation novels and a seemingly unrelated genre, what I'd call prophetic fantasy. These are novels — Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time cycle comes to mind — in which the protagonists have a mystical destiny, foreshadowed in visions and ancient writings, and the unfolding of the plot tells of their march toward that destiny.
Actually, I'm a sucker for that kind of fiction, which makes for great escapism precisely because real life is nothing like that. The first half of the Foundation series manages, however, to have the structure of prophecy and destiny without the mysticism; it's all about the laws of psychohistory, you see, and Hari Seldon's prescience comes from his mathematics. Yet if the Foundation books are a tale of prophecy fulfilled, it's a very bourgeois version of prophecy. This is no tale of the secret heir coming into his heritage, of the invincible swordsman winning the day with his prowess.
Asimov clearly despises both aristocracy and militarism; his heroes, such as they are, are unpretentious and a bit uncouth, with nothing martial about them. Foundation isn't about the triumph of the middle class, either.
- Post navigation.
- Support Aeon this December?
- Starting a Business on eBay.co.uk For Dummies.
- 2012 apocalypse!
- American And Latin-American Indians::A Brief and Informative Guide-And Much More.
- Ascoltare la pietra (Arti visive, architettura e urbanistica) (Italian Edition)!
We never get to see the promised Second Empire, which may be just as well, because it probably wouldn't be very likeable. Clearly, it's not going to be a democracy — it's going to be a mathematicized version of Plato's Republic, in which the Guardians derive their virtue from the axioms of psychohistory. What this means for the books is that while a relatively bourgeois society may be the winner in each of the duels, Asimov is neither endorsing that society nor giving it a special long-run destiny.
What this means for the storytelling is that the struggles don't have to be and aren't structured as a conventional tale of good guys versus villains, and the novels have that unexpected cynicism. The Foundation may start out a lot nicer than its barbarous neighbours, but it evolves over time into a corrupt oligarchy — and that's all part of the plan. And because the story arc is about the fulfilment of the Seldon Plan, not the triumph of the men in white hats, Asimov is also free to make some of his villains not especially villainous.
Bel Riose, the imperial general who menaces the Foundation, is more appealing than the plutocrats running the place at the time. Even the Mule, who endangers the whole plan, is a surprisingly sympathetic character. Which brings us to the Mule, the deus ex mutagen who drives the swerve in the plot halfway through the series. When I first read Foundation all those years ago, I resented the Mule's appearance, which interrupts the smooth tale of psychohistorical inevitability.
On a reread, however, I see that Asimov knew what he was doing — and not just because another book and a half of Seldon Crises would have gotten very stale. The Mule is a mutant whose ability to control others' emotions lets him conquer the Foundation and threaten the whole Seldon Plan.
To contain the menace, the Second Foundation — a hidden group of psychohistorians, the secret keepers of the Plan — must emerge from hiding. So far, this sounds like any of a hundred tales of the struggle between good and evil. But Foundation isn't that kind of series.