Lamps and light
Eight lamps, from a friendship measured in lamplight to Faraday’s candle on a lecture table. If someone asked me what this library is about, this is the trail I would hand them.
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Step 1: 寄黃幾復 For Huang Jifu
桃李春風一杯酒，江湖夜雨十年燈。Peach and plum in the spring wind, one cup of wine; / rivers and lakes in the night rain, ten years of lamplight.
One cup of wine in the spring wind, then ten years of lamplight in the night rain: Huang Tingjian measures a friendship apart in lamps, the unit this trail keeps; three centuries earlier, Du Fu sat under one lamp with an old friend after twenty years.
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Step 2: 贈衛八處士 For Wei the Eighth, a Gentleman Living Retired
今夕復何夕，共此燈燭光。And tonight, what night is this, / that we share the light of this lamp?
‘Tonight, what night is this, that we share the light of this lamp?’: after twenty years Du Fu eats spring chives cut in the night rain by children who were not born when the two friends last met; Li Shangyin’s candle, next, is one still waiting to be shared.
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Step 3: 夜雨寄北 Night Rain, Sent North
何當共剪西窗燭，卻話巴山夜雨時。When shall we trim the wick together by the west window / and talk about this night of rain in the Ba hills?
Li Shangyin cannot say when he will come home, so he promises a candle instead: one day they will trim the wick together by the west window and talk about this night of rain; Xin Qiji hangs a whole city with lanterns.
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Step 4: 青玉案·元夕 To the Tune Qingyu’an: The Lantern Festival
眾裡尋他千百度；驀然回首，那人卻在，燈火闌珊處。In the crowd I looked for that one a thousand times; / then suddenly I turned my head, / and that one was there, / where the lamplight was thin.
A thousand trees of lanterns, fish and dragon lamps dancing all night, a thousand searches through the crowd, and then the one he was looking for, standing where the lamplight is thin; from lanterns lit for a festival, turn to a candle that burns itself down to give light.
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Step 5: 紅燭 Red Candle
你流一滴淚，灰一分心。灰心流淚你的果，創造光明你的因。For every tear you shed, your heart turns a little more to ash. A heart of ash and tears: that is your fruit; creating light: that is your seed.
Wen Yiduo asks why a candle must burn to ash before it gives light, and decides that it weeps not because it burns but because a stray wind makes its flame unsteady; long before, Emerson had called books the lamps we go to when our own light fails.
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Step 6: The American Scholar
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.
Emerson warns against becoming a bookworm, but grants that when ‘the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining’ we go to the lamps that were kindled by older light, as fair a description of a library as any; next, a child at a window watches the man who lights the street.
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Step 7: The Lamplighter
O Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you!
A child at teatime watches Leerie come up the street with lantern and ladder and decides that, of all trades, lighting the lamps is the one to choose; Faraday puts a candle on the lecture table and asks children what it is doing.
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Step 8: The Chemical History of a Candle: Lecture I
There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy, than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.
Faraday shows children how the melted wax makes its own cup and climbs the wick, and ends his lectures wishing that they may, like the candle, ‘shine as lights to those about you’, which is the wish this whole trail has been making.