No Man is an Island

I found that I had three blogs so far this year with the same title of “Another Week” including the last one, which was rather disingenuous or unimaginative on my part. I could have picked more clever titles, but I won’t dwell on this further. Somehow, I have been more determined about a sequel to my first memoir, particularly after being asked by Jimmy Lo who was himself asked by a common friend why I had sent a copy to this friend with an autograph. I couldn’t figure out why at first – which would be more than five years ago – but then quickly recall that at least a few friends who shall remain namely had paid for more than a few copies in full and asked me to autograph them at the time when Covid was still around, which I did. These good-hearted friends were probably worried then that I couldn’t recover the printing costs and were trying their best unobtrusively to help me recoup costs. Great friends indeed.

We continued going places and eating out last week unabated, including a Burgundy dinner at ABC on Thursday when we caught up with some wine friends including a Steve Mack whom I hadn’t seen for quite a while; watching a Korean ballet at Kwai Tsing Theatre on Saturday which was rather unique in style and genre, it being our first visit to the Theatre which we found rather refreshing in more than one way; and attending a wedding dinner reception involving many friends from the Rotary community at a hotel in TST East. It is always heartwarming to see young people getting married with a view to bringing up a family. On Mid-Autumn Festival Day itself, Su decided to dine in and had something light after which we had a stroll in the park downstairs watching the kids milling around and enjoying the lights and atmosphere, taking some photos in between, some of which had already been posted. We recall the evenings we had parties to mark the occasions and couldn’t help feeling the passage of time. Turning to the current week, we found ourselves at an Italian restaurant on Star Street for two consecutive days due to some mix-up in diary management. To cut it short and as Su had already announced, we overloaded ourselves with beef and some mutton from a Master Butchery Class with wine pairing. There weren’t too many guests, most of whom having been invited by Mercato Gourmet, and we picked up two gourmet enthusiasts, Bernard and Cyclone.

In between eating and drinking, I picked up “No Man is an Island” by John Donne (1572 – 1632) who lived around the era of Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), both from England, Donne being a poet, scholar and Anglican priest and known for being the leader of the metaphysical poets, while the latter as a playwright, poet and actor, and known as England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon”.  I never had a chance to study English Literature in my University days, though I had made some friends who read the subject those days and even though some friends thought I had a BA in English Literature.  Anyway, I first came across “No Man” when a friend of my first mentor – Joseph C Fok – asked me what I knew of the work, circa 1972. This friend had a square face and was a look-alike, albeit a diminutive version of a former HK governor David Trench, and who liked to project himself as a well-read person and who always dropped names such as Milton, Keats, Kipling, Eliot and Shakespeare. I had tried to appear friendly with him because he presented himself as a buddy of my mentor, but I had not read “No Man” but had vaguely recalled that it was from the same work with a quote “For whom the bell tolls” which was turned into a 1943 American epic war film featuring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, and which was adapted from a fictional novel by Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961) who was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Fast forward many years after Rosita died and when I was building up my personal library with the help of Folio Society, I acquired “No Man is an Island” thinking that it was a full-length novel. Alas, it wasn’t. The piece was first published in 1624 from “Meditation XVII” in which John Donne explored the connectedness of all mankind in life and in death. It is an 81-word piece of work, inspired by the sound of bells tolling outside his sickbed window. He thought he was dying at the time, but he survived. Donne lived a very interesting life indeed. The book I acquired from Polio Society was a selection of his prose, edited and introduced by Rivers Scott (1921 – 2014), a literary editor and publisher who rescued a biography of Boris Johnson and who escaped as a young man from an Italian PoW camp. In the obituary written by Christopher Silvester, he was described as a self-effacing man who lived for books. In the Introduction of the book, he quoted from Professor John Carey’s “John Donne: Life, Mind and Art” that, “The first thing to remember about Donne is that he was a Catholic; the second, that he betrayed his Faith.” Well, John Carey (1934 – 2025) was a prominent British literary critic, essayist, and the Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford from 1975 until 2002. He was an Oxford don for over 40 years, specializing in Renaissance literature, particularly John Milton and John Donne, as well as Victorian figures like Charles Dickens.

The selection of prose from Donne covers a wide range of his works, which though edited to facilitate readers, is somewhat challenging but makes very interesting reads, particularly the sermons section. I tried to learn more from AI and the internet the political and religious backgrounds of those times, but again, it was not an easy task. It proves that knowledge and learning is a lifetime process and never ends. One stops learning when one does not exercise one’s mind or stops learning how to learn, which is why I am not a believer of AI taking over humanity. AI may take over areas or activities controlled by people who are minded doing so or inspired by less than elegant or pure motives. In the end, we rely on Faith.

In the meantime, I also picked up another Folio book: Relativity – the Special and the General Theory – by Albert Einsterin (1879 – 1955) introduced by Roger Penrose who was born on 8 August 1931, now 95 years old. We will see.