As we began our descent from the mountains, the image of Yi villages threaded together only by footpaths stayed in my mind. Not that they hadn’t been affected by the dispiteous anarchism of the Cultural Revolution, but they lived in relative isolation.

The twelfth century was the fist medieval century to know the sorry plight of distressed gentlefolk. Western society had, by then, discovered standards of display which the man of blood had to live up to, or fall in dignity.

Unburdened by defensiveness, Ravel is able to figure the exotic in ways that are genuinely open to the energies of the other as well as appropriative of them. Those emergies find their culminating expression in the “General Dance” celebrating the union of Daphnis and Chloe. By organizing its dithyrambic whirl with an irregular meter, 5/4, the dance becomes an orgy of “false steps” utterly alien to the European tradition of superenergetic finales.

The excitable puppy jumped all over the furniture.