Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

The Miracle of...

THE MIRACLE OF THE FOREST

When all the trees in the Middle Kingdom had vanished, the Daoist poets accused the Confucian civil servants of being responsible, asserting that the trees had been cut down for paper necessary for their reports on the preservation of the forest. The civil servants, in their turn, accused the poets, asserting that all the trees had beed used up on their poems about the forest’s unmatchable beauty. The ideograms of our poems are so perfect, that our descendants will be able to, with their assistance, see how magnificent the forest primeval had been! The ideogams of our reports are no less perfect, for they eloquently speak volumes of the imperative utility of the unforgetable forest! And only the lumberjacks had left no recorded traces of their prolific activity, inasmuch as they were entirely indifferent to writing, and perceived even the trees to be a specie of meaningless ideogram.

329