Notes from 'Mirrors' by Eduardo Galeano

Mirrors are filled with people. The invisible see us. The forgotten recall us. When we see ourselves, we see them. When we turn away, do they?

Memory

Some five thousand years before Champollion, the god Thoth traveled to Thebes and offered King Thamus of Egypt the art of writing. He explained hieroglyphs and said that writing was the best remedy for poor memory and feeble knowledge. The king refused the gift: “Memory? Knowledge? This invention will encourage forgetting. Knowledge resides in truth, not in its appearance. One cannot remember with the memory of another. Men will record, but they won’t recall. They will repeat, but they will not live. They will learn of many things, but they won’t understand a thing.”

China

China comes from Chin, Chin Shi Huang, its first emperor.Through blood and fire, he transformed a collection of warring fiefdoms into a nation. He imposed a common language and a common system of weights and measures, and he created a single currency of bronze coins with a hole in the center. To protect his domain he raised the Great Wall, an endless crest of stone that crossed the map and is still, twenty-two hundred years later, the most visited defensive barricade in the world. But he never lost sleep over such minutiae. The project of his life was his death: his sepulchre, his palace for the afterlife. Construction began the day he first sat on the throne at the age of thirteen, and year by year the mausoleum grew until it was larger than a city. The army that was to guard it also grew, to more than seven thousand horsemen and infantrymen, their uniforms the color of blood and their armor black. Those clay warriors, modeled by the very best sculptors, were born exempt from aging and incapable of treason. Today, they astonish the world. The funerary monument was the task of prisoners, who were worked to death and thrown to the desert. The emperor directed even the smallest details and he urged them to work faster and faster. Several times his enemies had tried to kill him. He traveled in disguise and every night he slept in a different house. He was terrified of dying without the great grave he deserved. The day arrived when the colossal undertaking was finished. The army was complete, the gigantic mausoleum too, and it was a masterpiece. Any change would have insulted its perfection. Then, when the emperor was about to complete half a century of living, death came for him and he let himself go. The great theater was ready, the curtain rose, the performance was about to begin. He could not possibly fail to show up. It was an opera composed for solo voice

The Secrete Language

Yang Huanyi, whose feet were crippled in infancy, stumbled through life until the autumn of the year 2004, when she died just shy of her hundredth birthday. She was the last to know Nushu, the secret language of Chinese women. This female code dated from ancient times. Barred from male language, which they could not write, women founded a clandestine one, out of men’s reach. Fated to be illiterate, they invented an alphabet of symbols that masqueraded as decorations and was indecipherable to the eyes of their masters. Women sketched their words on garments and fans. The hands that embroidered were not free. The symbols were.