Li Bai and the Moonlight

In a dark room, a patch of white lay on the floor.

It was thin and cold, and it stretched out right at the foot of the bed. The man lying there had just half woken in the night, his eyes not yet fully open. Looking down at that streak of white, he thought the night frost had fallen thick outside, settling in a thin layer over the ground.

Then he woke a little more. Frost cannot settle inside a house.

It was not frost. It was moonlight.

That night the moon was so bright that it shone right into the house, pouring a patch of white onto the floor that looked strangely like frost. The man lay still for a long while. Then he raised his head and looked at the moon. Then he lowered his head, and thought of home.

That is all. There is nothing more.

All of this is how people have long pictured a poem, and that poem is exactly 20 characters long. Four lines, five characters each, 20 in all. It is shorter than the note a mother scribbles before heading to the market. It is shorter, even, than the sentence being read aloud right now.

Those 20 characters have traveled for more than 1,200 years.

The man who wrote them was Li Bai. He was born in 701 and died in 762. His whole life fell within the Tang dynasty in China, which lasted from 618 to 907. He grew up in the land of Shu, the region now called Sichuan. It is a country of mountain behind mountain, where every road climbs, and the clouds hang so low that a person on foot could touch them.

One day he left those mountains, boarded a boat, and went down a great river.

After that he almost never stayed in one place again. For the rest of his life, Li Bai traveled. He went from region to region and from season to season. He slept at inns, slept at the homes of friends, and slept on boats along the great rivers. For a short time he was summoned to the emperor's court in Chang'an to write poems. Then he set off once more.

It was in Chang'an that he met an older poet named He Zhizhang. After reading the younger man's poems, He Zhizhang was astonished, and he gave him a name that later ages would keep on using. He called Li Bai an immortal banished from heaven to the world of people.

The name sounds grand, but on reflection it is a sad one. An immortal banished to earth is someone living very far from the place he truly belongs. He walks among people, sees everything, and can write all of it down. Yet inside, he always has somewhere else to miss.

Li Bai wrote a great many poems. About a thousand of them survive today. Some are long, full of roads clinging to cliffs so high they make the head spin, of rushing rivers, and of wanderings far up among the clouds. Yet the poem that has traveled farthest, the one the most people know by heart, is that tiny one. It is the poem of a man who wakes in the night, looks down at the floor, and mistakes moonlight for frost.

There is one more strange thing about those twenty characters. They wandered too, just like the man who wrote them.

The poem was copied by hand, again and again, over countless generations, from one book to the next. And the old books do not agree completely. In the first line, some versions speak of bright moonlight, others only of looking at the moonlight. In the third line, some have the poet raise his head to gaze at the bright moon, others at the mountain moon. There are just 20 characters, and already several of them differ.

Even the very first character is still argued over. It is usually understood to mean a bed, so for generations everyone who reads it sees at once a person lying indoors. But some scholars believe the character may mean a window frame, or the rim of a well out in the yard. If so, the man in the poem is not in bed at all. He is standing outdoors, beside the mouth of a well, under the moon.

No one has settled it for certain. And it hardly matters. What has kept the poem alive so long is not whether he lay or stood. It is two movements that anyone on earth can make: raising the head, then bowing it.

In English the poem is known as Quiet Night Thoughts. Read the way Vietnamese people read the old Chinese characters, its title is Tĩnh dạ tứ, and its first two lines sound like this.

Sàng tiền minh nguyệt quang, nghi thị địa thượng sương.

Plainly, they mean this: before the bed, bright moonlight, mistaken for frost upon the ground.

This is where many Vietnamese adults pause for a beat.

For a long time, this 20-character poem has been in the literature textbooks of Vietnamese schoolchildren, under a Vietnamese title, Cảm nghĩ trong đêm thanh tĩnh. Generation after generation has studied it, copied it into notebooks, and recited it in front of the class. They forgot almost everything else from that school year, yet these four lines stayed whole in their heads.

So those 20 characters traveled more than 1,200 years to reach the classrooms of today's parents. Then they lay quietly in memory for decades more, waiting until today to ring out once again, in a living room, in front of the children.

Then comes the full moon of the eighth lunar month.

On Mid-Autumn night, Vietnamese children carry lanterns out into the yard. Lion-dance drums boom in the lane, trays are set with baked and soft mooncakes, and laughter rings through the whole neighborhood. At the loudest moment, there is always one child who suddenly stops still, tips their head back, and gazes at the moon for a long time, for no reason at all.

That child has no idea what they have just done. They have made exactly the movement of the man who woke in the night, more than 1,200 years before.

And behind the child, on the brick floor of the yard, the moon has just poured down a long patch of white. It is thin, and cold, as if someone had just scattered frost there.