μαϑͱεμόρφωσιςのエイドン @Eidon@octodon.social

#pleroma (Source)

Inspired by @luka I bought a Fairphone 3, stripped it of its stock android, installed TWRP, Magisk and /e/os and am now running google-less and happy.

#fairphone #eos #lineageos #twrp #magisk #GoogleMustDie

Questa foto pazzesca mi ricorda questa illustrazione di Gustav Dorè per la Divina commedia

"Dal web"

Heavenly sunrise in the Maasai Mara.#Kenya, Photo by Usha Harish

My #cats, Uru (left) and Abo (right).

its my birthday.
boost my art.

Lady Murasaki and Sei Shonagon (author of “The Pillow Book”, 枕草子, makura no soshi) were contemporaries and although they were not acquainted, they knew of one another. However, in her diary (紫式部日記, Murasaki Shikibu Nikki, also translated by Royall Tyler), Lady Murasaki was rather snide about Sei Shonagon:

“Sei Shonagon is very arrogant. She thinks herself so clever and litters her writings with Chinese characters, but when you look at them carefully you will find many errors. Those who want to behave as if they were superior to others will lower their reputation. Will their future be brighter?”

What I found really surprising is that in the Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki criticized Sei Shonagon in a more implicit way. In chapter 20, Asagao (Tyler translates this as “The Bluebell” although Seidensticker’s “Morning glory” seems more correct), Genji says:

“More than the glory of flowers and fall leaves that season by season capture everyone’s heart, it is the night sky in winter, with snow glittering under a brilliant moon, that in the absence of all color speaks to me strangely and carries my thoughts beyond this world; there is no higher wonder or delight. Whoever called it dreary understood nothing.”

According to ichinen, this text invokes a poem by Sei Shonagon’s father, Kiyohara no Motosuke (清原 元輔). He was a famous poet and praised the winter moon in his poems, but his daughter says in her Pillow Book that the moon in winter is tasteless.

This anecdote and in fact the Tale of Genji as a whole illustrate to me how universal and timeless humanity and human behaviour are: although constrained by very different circumstances and cultural and societal parameters, Lady Murasaki’s stories and observations of the people from the Heian era are very recognisable for us today. That is of course one of the reasons for its enduring appeal.