Tantalus in Regenstein

I don't yet know what the relationship between this blog and my proper work is. Whatever it is, it must be subordinate because work is hard: the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, and don't get me started on the health plan.

My adviser's preferred metaphor for the difficulties of academic work is one R.G. Collingwood favored: wrestling with fog. Now, he is ex officio more successful than I am, so perhaps I should follow his lead. However, often I think it's more of a tantalizing experience. The needed insight, citation or expression is always just out of reach.

This came to mind today when I read a reference to a translation of Confucius' Analects 論語. Here, the master's beloved pupil Yan Hui 顏回 describes his attempts to understand the logic implicit in humane living (ren 仁). He says

The more I look up at it, the higher it soars; the more I penetrate into it, the harder it becomes. I am looking at it in front of me, and suddenly it is behind me. The Master is good at drawing me forward a step at a time; he broadens me with culture [wen 文] and disciplines my behavior through the observance of ritual propriety [li 禮]. Even if I wanted to quit, I could not. And when I have exhausted my abilities, it as though something rises up right in front of me, and even though I want to follow it, there is no road to take.*

Now if that doesn't say it, I don't know what does. I'll have to take a crack at translating it myself one of these days.

*Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont Jr., The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (New York: Ballantine, 1998), 128-29. Cited in John H. Berthrong, Expanding Process: Exploring Philosophical and Theological Transformations in China and the West (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2008), 111.