Timothy Brook. Vermeer's Hat

Seen in this way, the paintings into which we will look to find signs of the seventeenth century might be considered not just as doors through which we can step to rediscover the past, but as mirrors reflecting the multiplicity of causes and effects that have produced the past and the present. Buddhism uses a similar image to describe the interconnectedness of all phenomena. It is called Indra's net. When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in that web is tied a pearl. Everything that exists or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true -- every dharma, in the language of Indian philosophy -- is a pearl in Indra's net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel in the net. Everything that exists in Indra's web implies all else that exists. (p. 22)

If Donne in 1623 was excited to discover that no person was an island, it was because, for the first time in human history, it was possible to realize that almost no one was. No longer was the world a series of locations so isolated from each other that something could happen in one and have absolutely no effect on what was going on in any other. The idea of a common humanity was emerging, and with it the possibility of a shared history. The theology underpinning Donne's sense of the interconnectedness of all things is Christian, but the idea of mutual interconnection is not exclusive to Christianity. Other religious and secular logics are capable of supporting the same conclusion, and equally effective at provoking an awareness of our global situation and our global responsibility. As across Donne's continent, so in Indra's web: every clod, every pearl -- every loss and death, birth and coming into being -- affects everything else with which it shares existence. (p. 221)

The first Spanish commander who went to Manila tricked Soliman into granting him territory at Manila. He used an old ruse, borrowed from the Aeneid, of asking for a piece of land no bigger than an ox hide. As a Chinese writer indignantly reports the story several decades later, "The Franks tore the ox hide into strips and joined them end to end to a length of a dozen kilometers which they used to mark out a piece of land, and then insisted that the rajah filfill his promise. He was surprised but could not go back on his word as a gentleman and had to grant permission." (Timothy Brook. Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World. New York and London: Bloomsbury Press, 2008, p. 162).

A lovely little book! Drawing upon a lifetime of Chinese studies to connect maps, bowls, tobacco, and more to artifacts and objects of art in Vermeer's paintings, Brook provides an elegant and eloquent teasing out of the threads that bind us one to another. Indra's web puts me in mind of Bill Moyers's interview with the classics philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who speaks movingly of the fragility of goodness -- of the web of connections that ties one good life to another, so that each person's loss and sorrow is ours. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, writes Donne. It tolls for thee.