A very nice piece in First Things here on T’ao Chien (a.k.a. Tao Qian), a great figure in medieval Chinese poetry.

Considered rationally, however, only a person who is somewhat deranged could ever possibly care enough about politics to want to participate in its processes. Anyone able to read a piece of legislation with interest is already a tad demented, and anyone willing to write a piece of legislation clearly suffers from a minor obsessive psychosis. So God bless them, but God spare us their derangement.

Hard to argue with that.

T’ao has a walk-on part in my Coolidge (p.6, where I use his given name, Tao Yuanming) & there’s a shout-out to him in here somewhere.

David Hinton, the foremost translator of T’ao’s verse in English, picks a favorite here.