Wednesday, February 25, 2026

A carp, a dragon, and the Red Queen

I went to Yokohama yesterday for a public lecture and there was a dragon.


There is the legend of a carp going upstream in a  fall, and then becoming a dragon.


Masaru Sato, a former diplomat and author, recently said to me that a carp actually does not become a dragon. A carp remains a carp.


How true.


It would be rather that in a streaming water a carp needs to keep swimming, just to stay at the same place.


In this sense, a carp in a stream is similar to the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, who famously said to Alice: Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.





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