Many thanks to Wolfe Lowenthal, a different sort of Tai Chi master from the one portrayed in the novel, but equally fine. Some of the principles and practices of Tai Chi were drawn from his book, There Are No Secrets (North Atlantic Books, 1991). I also drew on Tai Chi, by Cheng Manch’ing and Robert W. Smith (Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1967).
My grateful appreciation goes to Rachel Koenig for much of the information about Chinese medicine, though naturally any errors or misinterpretations are my own.
I used Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao te Ching (Harper & Row, 1988). The story on p. 27 about “no complaints whatsoever” comes from a footnote in Mitchell’s translation (pp. 100-101), which he adapted from Zenkei Shibayama Roshi’s A Flower Does Not Talk.
Information about the tides comes from Joyce Pope, The Seashore (Franklin Watts, 1985), and George W. Groh, Land, Sea and Sky (Collier, 1966).
Quotations about the seaside town are from the Annual Reports of the Officers of the Town of Truro, 1965-1990.
Many of the examples of performance art are taken from Marcia Tucker’s book, Choices: Making an Art of Everyday Life (The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1986).
Quotes from the Samurai’s creed are from Alan W. Watts, The Spirit of Zen (Grove Press, 1958), p. 120. The poem quoted on p. 218 is taken from Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen (Vintage, 1989), p. 126.
“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” referred to on p. 288, is the title of a poem by Richard Wilbur, from Things of This World (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1956).