The Daughters of Charity in Tientsin, what would they make of a telephone? They might think it a candlestick hung with a bell. On certain evenings here in France, as the carbon lights flare up on the street corners, and laughter spills out from the open doors of the dance halls, and the telephone in the downstairs hall of my building begins trilling-I think how my old friends would not recognize this world. There were some of us who were lost, some I mourn still. I was lucky, blessed, for we did not all make it home. In my study, God led me everywhere, north and south, east and west, and though sometimes he took me into dangerous places, he always took me safely out of them again. Year after year, I kept turning the leaves, and when eventually I stopped, I was still nowhere near through. I made few sermons, but instead put my mind to studying the text of the land. I was-I am-both a naturalist and a priest, and for years my parish was the entirety of China. Like children, they must have been, eyes so wide they were ringed all round with white, seeing the world expand tremendously in a moment like that. I sent three carcasses back to Paris, and how I wish I had been present when they arrived! To be able to stand before the Académie des Sciences and say, “This is a creature that no longer exists in the wild, but I have seen it in its home far away on the other side of the world, and now I give it to you to study.” Then to pry open the boxes and see the wonder on those great men’s faces. There was the deer they ended up naming after me, too, the one whose parts are strange and incongruous as a chimera’s, unknown outside the imperial gardens until I introduced it to the world. I had discovered hundreds of new species of flora and fauna: the butterfly bush and blue corydalis, the small snow finch, the Mongolian gerbil, the Chinese wild peach, and on and on. Yes, I discovered him! I had traveled far and wide through China by then, from the plains to the mountains, from the desert to the sea. AND SO I CAME to Muping and discovered the panda.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |