Pity the Half-Man

“I think now that the simplest questions are not only the hardest to answer but the most important to ask...” 

― Northrop Frye, “The Educated Imagination” 

「千里之行，始於足下。」 ― 老子

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” ― Laozi

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Dear Alex,

Sometimes it takes a thousand miles of success to see our folly in the last stride. When you stand to gain mileage ahead of most people, you may be merely a moment from your last mile.

Call it fate or curse, think it away with any name but yours. The journey to your demise can spark with the flurry of a thousand questions that miss a single honest pair:

What question have you never asked yourself? And why?

Laozi or “Old Master”, possibly teacher of Confucius and poshly posited for millennia from ancient Chinese dynasties to modern philosophy, might well have been more of a myth than man. Traces of his thousand-mile maxims have been linked in 1993 to a village in Guodian, Hubei province, where 800 bamboo strips from the Warring States period (403-221 B.C.), each laced with virtue in Chinese calligraphy and ink attributed to the central corpus of Laozi, were unearthed from the floor of a coffin-sized tomb by a river and farmhouse.

One of the reconstructed passages in the complex Guodian bamboo texts flows to pathways in the heart:

「凡人青(情)為可兌(悅)也。句(苟)以其青(情)，唯(雖)(過)不亞(惡); 不以其青(情)，唯(雖)難不貴。 句(苟)又(有)其青(情)，唯(雖)未之為， 斯人信之壴(矣)。」

“In general, true affections in a person are something to delight in. If one does something with true affections, though he may transgress, this is not to be deplored. If one does something not with true affections, though he may [accomplish] difficult [tasks], these are not to be valued. If one has true affections, though he has not yet done something, people will have trust in him [to do so].”

These crossroads of deed and trust, love and betrayal have framed the character of the Chinese drama series, “Story of Yanxi Palace”. I watched one of its final episodes during my run on treadmill yesterday.

By then, a thousand stings and storms have toppled the true motive of a top palace eunuch, Yuan Chuanwang, for his attempted assassination of Emperor Qian Long (1711-1799). Chuanwang had ballooned in stature from commode cleaning in his earliest decade to supervisory roles just before his capture. In rebuke, the Empress Dowager asked him:

“Why have you masterminded all these damages that now lead to your death? You have believed in a lie - a hometown gossip about your forsaken royal bloodline. So you planned for imperial service as half-man to murder, your manhood cleaved. You could have found fulfillment as a complete common man. But you choose to live in an illusion, and for this, I pity you.”

An inquiry to his illusion and ours, the thousand-mile road to seek and secure purpose is haunting and lovely, grinding away our sense of safety, edging us to unknown fringes, swirling in our crisis of habits.

How far are you willing to go and see your illusions and mine?

Yours, Kate