鼯鼠: My Life as a Flying Squirrel

Many of us here on earth cultivate for ourselves an identity. After some reflection and a little imagination, we take extra pride in identifying with some particular configuration of abilities, characteristics, or even physical or ethnic features.

I am one of these people, and I have long cultivated, and perhaps taken pride in, my “jack-of-all-trades” nature. I remember making a business card on some vending machine in London back in 7th grade. On the card I made “Jack-of-all-trades” the “title” attached to my name. Perhaps from around that time I decided that my interests and abilities were so diffuse and I was so utterly incapable at excelling in any one of them that I would have to develop some unique combination that would get me through life. What is somewhat odd about this, though, is that this ended up leading me to celebrate my own mediocrity in any and all of my pursuits.

I was reminded of this tonight. After rereading a book by Kenneth Pyle on The New Generation in Meiji Japan for my modern Japan historiography class, I wanted to see how Pyle’s portrayal of the Japanese intellectual Hasegawa Nyozekan meshed with Andrew Barshay’s portrayal of him in the latter half of his book State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (Whole book is online). There I found quoted an old passage from Nyozekan’s journal that I had highlighted a few years ago:

He is a good jumper, but can’t reach the roof; a skillful climber, but can’t make it to the top of the tree; an easy swimmer, but can’t cross the stream; a deep digger, but can’t cover himself up; a fast runner, but can’t outrun a man…

Five skills you possess
Yet not in one are you accomplished.
Flying squirrel, how can you brag?

Barshay notes that this is a reference to a passage in the first book of Xunzi (“The wingless dragon has no limbs and yet it can soar; the flying squirrel has many talents but finds itself hard-pressed.”) I really like this little passage, and I think that, like Nyozekan, I feel very much like a flying squirrel. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not the least bit unhappy with my fate as a flying squirrel. I believe that I have successfully developed a combination of skills and interests so bizarre and unlikely that my very presence in the world helps mitigate its monotony. I believe I am the only squirrel in the entire world to have precisely this particular configuration and by golly, there was a niche for me in society after all.