VOLUME III, SEMESTER 4, CHAPTER 42
Four Things Holding Up One Person’s Whole Life
Milk powder, diapers, a vaccine, three midnight runs to the clinic. In the first three years a person makes nothing and consumes the heaviest outlay of the house, and no one reckons the account with him. That is where this chapter starts. Last chapter drew the four onto one person’s day, from light to dark. This chapter draws the rule out longer, not a day but a life, from the day he comes into the world to the day he goes. Drawn out long, a thing shows that a day cannot: the four rules do not measure evenly; they keep the house by turns, a stretch at a time, and a few gaps drop in the middle that other hands must catch. This chapter walks one life from head to tail.
The first section looks at the two ends. The first three years a person’s yield is zero, yet what he consumes is not one bit short, and the one proof handed over is that he needs, he who cannot yet even ask, who can only cry. Then a dozen years of school, the schoolhouse raised by the public purse, the teacher’s wage paid by it, a society willing heart and mind to keep a batch who make nothing, a dozen years, and not press them once, for force that rule and it would mean a six-year-old earning his own fee. The last stretch is the same, the pension, the health cover, the runs to the hospital, not one reckoned by what he did this month. And it points a layer many never think through: the pension he draws is not the sum he saved young; it is being paid in now by the batch at work now, the rule of need stepping across the generations, one holding up the next, and let the chain break and the first to fall is the end with the least strength. The two ends together are near half a life, and the most vital half. It borrows the Movement of the Rites: let the aged reach their end, the strong have their use, the young their growth, one line dividing a life and the rules to divide it by, and Mencius: to nourish the living and bury the dead with no regret, that is the beginning of the kingly way.
The second section looks at the middle thirty and forty years. The year he was twenty-two the rule that measured him changed of a sudden: the twenty-two years before, all men asked what do you need; from that day, all men asked how much did you do. In this stretch one person holds up three ends, himself, the generation above, the generation below, and the three do not queue, they press down in one and the same month, so this stretch must be kept by labor, or he stops his hand and all three ends fall. Yet keeping the house is not standing alone; he goes home and feeds his mother medicine by the rule of need, the tenth of each month a mortgage is the shadow of the wall, his housing fund is in the market as capital, four things not one short. And it points two ills of taking one stretch for the whole. One is forgetting the ground others laid under his feet, taking another’s decades of holding-up for a thing born his by right. One is worse, in the day he can work no longer, taking the rule that measures the prime to measure his own old age, and measuring out a shame that should not be. The weariness of this stretch is real, and its weight is real too, for only here can a person give.
The third section looks at the hardest place, the gaps dropped in the middle of a sudden. That forty-year-old weaver did not slack and did not do wrong; only on a certain day no one came to buy his cloth. Sickness, hurt, the company folding, the trade shifting, tending an old one, these are no accident; they are the common way of a life. A gap comes and the rule of labor is the first to go mute: the yield may be zero, the outlay not one bit less. Three hands reach out: the family the fastest and warmest and most bounded, the society’s share that does not know him and owns only that he is fallen in the gap, and the market’s slowest hand that alone can send him back under the rule of labor. And the measure is here: to catch is not to hold in the arms; caught and sent back is holding up; only caught is keeping; only sent is driving off; the mechanism guards the bottom line and character fixes the height.
Here is the method, and here is what is carried out. The method is to land the large line on one small life, so that it is met not as doctrine but as a road a person will walk himself. What is carried out is chapter forty’s line set on one person: the four rules, no one can be pulled out. Pull out the rule that does not ask what is put in, and he does not live past the first stretch nor walk out the last. Pull out the rule of labor, and in the middle no one is willing to put out strength, and the two ends have nothing to hold up. Pull out the hands that catch the gap, and any one fall in the middle and he cannot rise, the two ends held for nothing. Short one and there is no world, landed on one life, looks just like this. The next chapter pulls the lens wider again, not one person but the four among themselves, how they coexist, and why two thousand years on no one has thrown out another.
SECTIONS
One, Infant and Old One: The Two Stretches That Do Not Ask What Is Put In
Two, The Decades of Labor: The Rule of Labor Keeps the House
Three, Sickness, Hurt, the Missed Step: The Man in the Gap
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
One, Infant and Old One: The Two Stretches That Do Not Ask What Is Put In