Today's characters are:
寒來暑往
hán lái shŭ wăng
"Winter cold comes, summer heat goes."
Not a whole lot to this line, really. Together, 往來 can mean "come and go," as both verbs imply movement, and we've already seen that Chinese is fond of using paired nouns or antonyms to create a new word. Actually, "word" isn't quite right; "concept" is more like it. I haven't found 寒 and 暑 used together in such a manner, but their counterparts, 冬 and 夏, are, at least in modern Chinese, where they mean, unsurprisingly, "winter and summer." 春秋, or "spring and autumn," is the more famous seasonal pair: the "Spring and Autumn Annals" supposedly written by 孔子 Confucius about the state of 魯 Lu is the first thing that comes to mind. The phrase is also, as Kroll puts it, a "synecdoche for a year."
寒 and 暑, while signifying winter and summer, can represent their effects (i.e., cold and heat) alone, so another reading of this line is "cold and heat come and go." Either way, the emphasis on cycles and transience is something I've always appreciated about Chinese thought.
再見，看官.
微臣
史大偉
No comments:
Post a Comment