May 11, 2019
Wet feet in Bingzhongluo
Thin air, patience and two thumbs, nice people and old buildings
10/05/2019
Patience in the thin air
It's been raining here since I arrived three days ago. Today the temperature has dropped and this evening should get down to about 10c. When the clouds part and I get a fleeting glimpse of the mountains that surround us, I get an inkling of what is out there. Bingzhongluo is at 2000 metres, sitting on a small bit of level ground 500 metres above the river and the mountains that rise steeply on all sides. The hills that I can see shrouded in the cloudy mist look like I could reach out and touch them, then I realise that those little farmlet shacks that look so close are about another 600 metres above me on the other side of the river and would take all day to reach. About mid day the clouds lifted for only a few minutes and I could just make out more mountains rising even higher than the ones close at hand, covered with a fresh dusting of snow. Checking my map app, it’s telling me they are over 4,000 metres high. That is seriously thin air, over 13,000 feet in American speak.
I’ve got nowhere to go, my plane doesn’t leave for another 15 days. I’m going to wait out the rain and the clouds and have a good look around once it clears/warms up.
Patience is called for.
Two thumbs prose
I grew up in California in the pre-internet era, and although we learnt to touch type in high school, our thoughts were organised with pen and paper. Even at uni all of my drafts were laboriously hand written and the final finished product carefully typed. Harvard referencing, no whiteout (only one correction allowed per page), double spacing, etc… The point being: my thoughts were captured and organised by hand. It took time to craft a sentence and most importantly, you had time to consider the flow of ideas, the choice of words to express those ideas, sentence structure and syntax. I think my prose was better then than now.
Touch typing with a keyboard onto a computer screen changed all of that. I've actually lost the ability to write well with pen and paper. Those brain synapses and muscles have long since atrophied. Now the fingers can type almost as fast as I can think. The computer is great for editing and massaging large blocks of text into place, I have no doubt about that. But I'm not sure that the speed with which raw ideas are captured as text results in good prose. Yes, it is quick, but quick and quality usually don't fit in the same sentence.
It's still raining here, even the nearest hills are shrouded in mist. And the internet is down, so I sit at at the front room window of the hostel watching the rain and watching the people and thumb typing onto my mobile phone. And even though it is as slow as writing by hand, I have my doubts that thumb typing onto a mobile phone screen will result in good prose.
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Old Buildings
Went for a walk up the hill behind town and stumbled onto some more traditional buildings.
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Ken here: this silly old guy is older than you and he also grew up with pen and paper but his writing skills have substantially improved by being able to voice type and then edit on the computer screen. I guess it is different for everybody. But then I admire your prose and believe that mine is a long way behind yours.
4 years ago