Moonlight pools on the floor beside the bed, so pale and still that for a moment a traveler far from home mistakes it for frost. He lifts his head to the bright moon, lowers it again, and thinks of the place he came from. That is the whole poem: twenty characters, four short lines, the smallest possible motion of a head raised and a head bowed. Almost every child in China learns Quiet Night Thoughts by heart, and grown people still murmur it at the Mid-Autumn Festival when the moon comes up round and cold over a country of people who are all, somehow, missing somewhere. wrote it thirteen centuries ago and it has never once loosened its hold. It knows the exact ache of being awake in a strange room, of looking up at the one thing you and everyone you love can see at the same time, and feeling the distance in it.