‘It is a beautiful spring morning and the sun is shining brightly, but there is no sun bright enough to penetrate the dark clouds that are covering the whole earth.’

Chinese Puzzles
by Theodore Dalrymple 

One picture, said Mao Tse-Tung, is worth a thousand words, and in a sense he was right. A thousand words cannot describe adequately your current visual field, or even the tiniest part of it (I don’t think you should even try); but neither can pictures adequately convey what you are able to say in words. We don’t have different faculties for nothing.

I used rather to despise books that consisted mainly of pictures, but recently I have changed my opinion. (Even what I consider to be recent has changed with age, ten or even fifteen years ago now seeming to me quite recent). I don’t go as far as Alice, who doubted the use of books without pictures; but neither do I any longer doubt the use of books without words, or almost without words. Perhaps childhood and second childhood are the ages at which one appreciates pictures in books.

It is possible that my new-found appreciation of picture-books is a sign of cognitive decline: that I no longer have the patience, concentration or memory to read great blocks of print (perhaps the young never will, thanks to electronic screens of all kinds). But I do not think so, I still regularly read tomes that others might consider intimidating in density and length. There is also the possibility that I have changed my mind simply to prove to myself that I am still capable of doing so, that I do not suffer from that condition that a brilliant friend of mine called the hardening of the concepts, worse even that hardening of the arteries (though sometimes associated with it). But again I do not think so. Rather it is that, thanks to the passage of time, my memory is now so well-stocked that images easily evoke the recollections or associations that are the principal consolation of one’s declining years. This is also one of the pleasures of browsing in second-hand bookshops: a recollection or association evoked by chance is more pleasurable than one that is systematically search for.

Last week I came across (and bought, despite its extravagant price) a book of photos titled L’Empire Céleste, the Celestial Empire. As this would suggest, it was a book about Imperial China, though in fact there were also pictures in it of the republican period up to the 1930s.

My connections to and with China are few and tenuous. I have been twice to the country; the first time convinced me that China’s industrial pollution is a serious problem (and that was only at the beginning of China’s dramatic economic growth!), and the second time was to report from Peking for a newspaper on a giant United Nations jamboree there on the condition of women in the world. At the press conference given by a British minister, who in her brief preliminary statement demanded that the health of men and women be equalised, I asked whether this meant that men should live longer or women should live shorter. A British civil servant stepped forward like an adult protecting a child (the minister) and said that my question was not serious and therefore unworthy of an answer: an answer that the minister in any case could not have given because she had by then grown so accustomed to the sound of her own platitudes. For myself, I thought that my question went straight to the heart of egalitarian philosophy, but that of course was its problem.

When I was a child my father had a multi-volume pictorial history of the war (it was called Hutchinson’s Pictorial History of the War, and I still recall its heavy green embossed covers). I spent many hours looking at it, but the one photo that affected me most was of China. It was of a dead baby in a flimsy makeshift coffin in a field of rubble with ruins in the background, and no other human in sight. I must have been less than eleven years old at the time, for we moved when I was eleven and the books did not come with us. That one picture more than any other gave me an early appreciation of the horror of war, though like any other boy at the time I enjoyed making models of the aeroplanes that helped to bring it about.

My maternal grandparents were refugees in Shanghai, but they died at the end of the war and are (I believe) buried there. I was surprised to discover after my mother’s death that she had received letters in England from them throughout the war, presumably through the good offices of the Red Cross. One of the letters to her from her father in Shanghai said, ‘It is a beautiful spring morning and the sun is shining brightly, but there is no sun bright enough to penetrate the dark clouds that are covering the whole earth.’ He went on to express the belief that one day the clouds would clear, but his hope was clearly less strong and more hypothetical than his despair, the reasons for which were all too real and evident. He died at just about the time the clouds were clearing, in 1945, but had he remained in China he soon would have seen them gather again.

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