Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Premature Hippy

To Shanghai. A delayed flight prompting groans from fellow travellers left me secretly pleased. A little extra time to finish Patrick French's biography of Francis Younghusband, the 'last great imperial adventurer'. I knew vaguely about his travels in Kashmir & the Gobi and his 'invasion' of Tibet in 1904, but didn't know the half of it. Starting as a soldier and explorer, he then became a journalist, an author, a founder of many societies and finally a sort of mystic, pre-New Age philosopher. A life led to the full... though he lost me with his cosmic rays and divine love.
Coincidentally I was given a book yesterday called On the Culture of Harmony by a chap called Gordon Wang, which very much followed on from Younghusband's musings. It's a slight thing at 92 pages but even so, its brief search for "where humans are headed in terms of both time and space" went straight over my head.

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