Silk Mass
Because my life is awesome, the following package arrived in the mail on Friday.
For those of you without images for some reason, that’s:
- Mass Effect 3, which I’ve opened but won’t get a chance to seriously devour before my book deadline at the end of the month.
- Life Along the Silk Road, by Susan Whitfield, director of the International Dunhuang Project, the project dedicated to cataloguing the Dunhuang Manuscripts, about which more later I promise but trust me it’s awesome. Basically, Whitfield is one of (if not the) best qualified people (/person) on the planet to write this book, which is a series of short biographies of the life and times of different types of characters who wandered the Silk Road over a few hundred year span of history. SO excited to read this!
- Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization, by Richard Foltz, which if that title doesn’t make you salivate, well, you’re probably a more normal person than I am and that’s okay, you don’t need to feel bad. But OH MY I can’t wait to burn through this. There’s a chapter on each of about twelve different religions, analyzing their spread and codevelopment across the road. Incredible!
In case you’re wondering, no, I’m not really planning a book set on the Silk Road right now. I haven’t traveled the region enough (though one day…)—it’s just one of the most fascinating historical areas of the world, and it’s so hard for most Westerners to study. ‘Lost’ civilizations galore! Nestorian Christianity as an important religious and philosophical force! International commerce linking China to the west! Intrigue! Scheming! Revolution! Genghis Khan! The Tang Dynasty! The spread of Buddhism! I spent a few years desperately wanting to become a Silk Road scholar, until I finally realized that even with (at the time) quite excellent Chinese I still could barely manage the primary source reading, and on top of Chinese I’d need about five modern languages at a similar level and somewhere between five and seven ancient languages, a few of which are insanely obscure (I’m looking at you, Sogdien). Ten years or so of pure language study was a daunting prospect, psychologically and financially speaking. Basically, the Silk Road is INCREDIBLY COOL and I have absurd heaping gobs of respect for Silk Road scholars, and insane gratitude for the ones who publish in English so I can reap the benefits of their linguistic kung fu badassitude. Only mid 19th century China rivals Silk Road studies for sheer mindblowingness in my eyes, and that has more to do with the sheer WTF-ery of the Taiping Tianguo .
So yes. I get cool mail.