VOLUME III, SEMESTER 4, CHAPTER 42, SECTION 3
Sickness, Hurt, the Missed Step: The Man in the Gap
The first two sections divided a life into three stretches. The first stretch does not ask what is put in, the middle stretch labor keeps the house, the last stretch back again to not asking what is put in. Were a life truly this neat, this chapter to here would be enough. But everyone knows the days do not walk this way.
The truly hard place is not at the head, nor at the tail; it is in the middle. In those thirty and forty years in the middle, a few gaps drop in of a sudden. Fallen sick. Hurt. The company gone under. Or twenty years at a trade, and of a sudden no one wants it. These few come with no warning, and choose no one. This section tells of these gaps, of why that keeping rule of a sudden measures no one here, and of the few hands that reach out to catch.
One, that forty-year-old weaver
The second semester told of a man, remembered well. He is forty, has woven cloth twenty years, the craft in his hands among the best in the village, how many feet he turns out in a day he knows in his heart with his eyes shut. The whole family’s food and clothing, the child’s schooling, the old one’s medicine, all come off that loom.
Then the machine came. The cloth the machine wove was cheaper than his, faster than his, more even than his. He did not slack, did not do wrong, did not offend anyone, the craft is still the craft, the man still the man. He only found, on a certain day of a sudden, that no one at the market came to buy his cloth.
The rule of labor reckons this way: how much you did, how much you get. But this time the trouble is not in how much he did; it is that what he made no one wants. He still weaves each day, the cloth he weaves heaps up in the house, and that rule measures out not one cent.
This is the gap in its most typical shape. It is not that he stopped his hand; it is that the trade in his hand of a sudden was worth nothing. The whole second semester spoke of scarcity, of the market’s rule, and landed on one man it is this heap of cloth no one buys, and a forty-year-old who of a sudden does not know what to do tomorrow.
Two, the gap is no exception, it is the common way of a life
One may think: this is a thing of that era, a thing of that trade, and nothing to do with oneself. Beat this thought down early. Count what is near at hand and it is clear. A great sickness lays a person up three months. A crash tends him half a year. The company folds and half a year finds no new one. The trade shifts and a craft must be learned from the start. An old one at home falls gravely ill and someone must quit and go home to tend a year. Among these, a person in a life must strike one or two, and the unlucky strike three or four in a row, all packed into one and the same span of months.
So the gap is no accident; it is a part of the common way. It is not one pit on this road; it is a few stretches of mud the road had to begin with. A person’s eighty years, could he truly walk the thirty and forty years under the rule of labor without one day missing, that is luck of the highest, not the way it should be to begin with, still less a way to be asked of another.
Take the gap for an exception, and the easiest ill to come is: then let him own it himself. Since it is an exception, then he is unlucky, or he is not up to it. But if the gap is the common way to begin with, then the question changes its asking. It is not how one man should manage on his own; it is who a society sets to catch these stretches, catch how long, and how to send the man back.
Three, in the gap, that keeping rule loses its force
Look again at that rule of labor. It keeps the house most in this middle stretch, yet a gap comes and it is the first to go mute. A man lying in a sickbed, his yield this month is zero. A man just cut, his yield this month is zero. A man who quit to tend his mother, his yield this month is zero too. By that rule these three should all get zero this month, not one bit more.
Yet they must eat, the child must still go to school, the mortgage is still deducted the tenth of each month, the medicine cost climbs by the day. The yield may be zero, the outlay is not one bit less, and sometimes more. What truly breaks a person is mostly not that he is poor one day; it is these two ends, one cut off and one climbing, and the little savings between thinning month by month. A layer here must be seen clear: it is not that rule gone bad; it is that this stretch is not its to handle. It handles the days with work to do and strength to do it. A man with no work to do, or unable to do it, is not its to handle. Chapter forty spoke of the rule each having its place, and this section is that line’s most vital landing in a life.
Four, three hands reach out to catch
When the rule measures the man no more, hands must reach out to catch. These few hands are no thing thought up on the spot; they were tried out generation by generation, and set down after loss taken too. In the gap the hands that reach out are commonly three, come in a different order, catch a different weight. The first is the family. The mother takes out the passbook, the brother lays down this month’s loan first, the wife takes on one more piece of work, the child’s interest class is stopped first. This hand is the fastest, the warmest, and the least asking of cause, coming without even a why. Yet it is the most bounded. In a house with a thin bottom this hand cannot hold a few months, and held to the end the whole family falls together.
The second is the society’s share. The health cover pays most of the hospital sum, the out-of-work money comes by the month a few months, the low-income line holds the lowest thread, the work injury has a sum of compensation. This hand does not know him, and does not ask whose child he is; it owns one thing only: he is fallen in the gap this moment. This is just the rule of need, spread from within one house and clan to across a city, a country. The second section of chapter forty said this change: what changed is the form and the thickness, not the coming from nothing.
The third is the market’s end. The free retraining, the word of a hiring, a temporary job to do first, a trade newly grown. This hand comes the slowest, and is the hardest to bear. A forty-year-old learning a craft from the start, sitting in a room of people in their twenties, cannot keep his face. Yet it is the only hand that can send a man back under the rule of labor. The first two hands catch him from falling, this one hand props him back to walk on.
Five, these hands show most a society’s grain
On the smooth days the four rules each keep their place, and no one can tell the shares apart. A gap comes and the shares are told at a glance. Were a society left with only the rule of labor, then the man fallen in the gap drops straight to the bottom. Sick, he waits. Out of work, he bears it alone. His cloth unsold, he owns it himself. In such a place everyone must save a great sum for guard, and none dares change trade, none dares fall sick. On the face it is the highest-yield reckoning, not one cent wasted. In truth it reckons every person’s nerve down small, afraid to change trade, afraid to fall sick, afraid to bear a child, afraid to try a thing without a sure hold.
But turn it round, and if those hands catch too soft, too long, another ill comes. The third semester spoke of a few shapes of need misused: to catch is to let him stand up, not to let him sit down and not go. Hold the hand out and never let go, hold till the man himself no longer wants to move, and that is no catching; that is pinning him there.
So the measure is here: to catch is not to hold in the arms. The share of those three hands is just here too: the family and the society’s two hands catch him first from falling, the market’s one hand props him back under the rule of labor. Caught, and sent back, this is called holding up. Only caught and not sent back is keeping. Only sent and not caught is driving off. That line of the third semester takes force a second time here: the mechanism guards the bottom line, character fixes the height.
Six, what this section sets, and the close of this chapter
What this section sets is a line: in a person’s life there are always a few gaps the keeping rule cannot measure, and when it cannot, other hands must catch. Put this chapter’s three sections together, and a person’s life becomes a picture. The first stretch does not ask what is put in, the last stretch does not ask what is put in, the middle thirty and forty years labor keeps the house, and in this middle a few gaps drop, caught by turns by the family, the society, and the market, three hands. The four things do not walk in a queue through his life; they divide the stretches and change the shift, holding him up from head to tail.
Chapter forty said the four rules, no one can be pulled out, and that was set on one account. This chapter sets it on one person’s whole life. 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 the middle thirty and forty years no one is willing to put out strength, and the two ends front and back have nothing to hold up. Pull out the few hands that catch the gap, and in any one year of the middle he takes one fall and cannot rise again, and the two ends held ever so well are held for nothing. Short one and there is no world, landed on one person, looks just like this.
This chapter walks here and is done. The next chapter pulls the lens wider again, not one person, but the four among themselves: how they coexist, why two thousand years on, no one has thrown out another.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.