Sitting on Top of the World
on November 28, 1974
Remoteness is often a condition of status and an attitude cultivated by parties to inequality. Chinese peasants, for more than twenty centuries subjects not citizens of the realm, were being literal when they said, “Heaven is high and the emperor far away.” Their world was circumscribed by the village pump and the market place; their vision was local, concerned with how to make ends meet, or, infrequently, millennial, concerned with how to meet the End.
