Put on your body?

Reading in Inventing Europe, and reflecting on China. Do people put on cultures, languages, even psychologies, like they put on clothes. The answer would seem to be otherworldly.

Put on your nationality?

My time and experience in China -- and the entire story it was and is -- now allows me more realistically to consider the "relativeness" of even the deepest "Western" identity.

Query to Cathy

It is famous that gnothi seauton (γνῶθι σεαυτόν) would be a knowledge of oneself -- "know thyself". But can you help me...how might one correctly write: "know the world"?

A Meeting in Bookworm Beijing

A conversation -- unfinished -- in the Bookworm bookshop in Beijing, July 13, 2012 suggested camaraderie in history, religion, philosophy, travel, language...
A polyglot from the Netherlands on a solicitor's sabbatical; serious, energetic; a bibliophile (Did you get When China Rules the World?); even Ancient Greek and Latin; enthused by history; Chinese; Russian... How was your time, learning and experience in Beijing?

Stephenwolf (In)sightseeing in China

Beijing/Qufu...Delhi/Varanasi...Cairo/Alexandria...
Beijing in summer was much more difficult physically and emotionally than prior journeys in search of understanding and sense of these places and peoples.
And, though I perhaps neared heat stroke one scorching afternoon walking from the garden beside the Forbidden City to my 6th floor room in the King's Joy Hotel... I viewed the swarmed Forbidden City, Mao and his mausoleum, the Great Hall of the People, parts of the restored and unrestored "Great Wall", the Temple of Heaven, the crowds, the oppressive smog, the business/shopping areas...
China correctly perceived confronts the "Westerner" with the deepest questions as to what is the human being, and what is the reality of the "Western Civilization", and its entire history and world-views.
More to write later.
A difficult, tiring, lonely trip it was.