Epigrues

I am a pure AI outsider. I don’t know anything about the nuts and bolts and have only dabbled with ChatGPT. I mostly am responding to the claims, counterclaims, and criticisms of various individuals whose competence is unknown to me.

In what I’ve seen AI advocacy is heavily influenced by utopian ideology, personal ambition, and massive financial speculation. This does not refute the claims made but they should be a red flag. (AI promoters will, of course, say similar things about my stodginess and lack of ambition). And in particular, AI advocacy is partly defined by the kind of IQ worship I’ve seen so often among ambitious people with tech training who have gotten to where they are by passing test after test, and among post-humanist eugenicists who basically believe that low-IQ people do not deserve to live.

More to the point is my perception that AI does not have intentions. It’s sort of a virtuoso pass-through which answers questions or fulfills instructions from outside on the basis of the body of texts it has been provided with. It frequently makes mistakes or “hallucinates”, but when you point that out, it seems unbothered and just amiably corrects itself.

The fluency of AI I’ve seen in performing mediocre tasks like writing newspaper editorials is awesome, but it’s been a long time since I took newspaper editorials and various other public statements at face value. What are the possibilities that uncaring AI will ever produce anything of real interest? It seems to me that all human intellectual accomplishments of any interest so far have been the work of people who cared deeply about something. (And likewise, of course, much human intellectual work is lacking any interest. Caring is necessary but not sufficient, as I see it). In any field of thought, the greatest accomplishments are by people who have a goal in mind and keep plugging away until they get a result.

To me this is philosophically interesting in this way: for a long time (some) philoophers have assumed that perfect Truth could be attained only by a pure, objective, neutral mind without any biases or preferences or intentions. Don’t we have something like that with AI, and isn’t the result a machine that can effortlessly and indiscriminately pump out any and all answers to any and all questions at the snap of a finger? Maybe intentions are a necessity of thought rather than a corruption, and maybe intentions are embodied in the question asked, so that the right question is the necessary, non-neutral, intentional starting point.

Next, all the AI promo I’ve seen seems to assume that “intelligence”(which, “general intelligence” above all, is basically undefined) is a quality of individuals, like height or weight or metabolism. However, the sorts of intelligence that are worshiped are social facts possible only in group interchanges.ewton said “I stood on the shoulders of giants”: Ulugh Beg, Tycho, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler. But it’s not just 6 individuals either: each of these, including Newton also had his partners, peers, and assistants, and all were financially supported by states, established churches, and feudal holdings. All of them lived in societies supportive of the kind of work they did, and they were pretty widely distributed in space.

IQ is not enough. Newton was brilliantly intelligent, but he was triumphant in physics because of his peers and generations of predecessors, When his high IQ got to work on chemistry / alchemy late in life, he accomplished little or nothing, since the giants for him to stand on the shoulders of (Priestley, Lavoisier, Mendeleev, Helmholtz, et al) were still in the future. He was smart enough and hard working enough, but the ancient tradition he was working in was wildly wrong on key points.

One way of looking at the potentials of AI is to aske whether AI can make the kind of difference that human authors can make. I will use the English language novel as an example, but I think that the same qustion can be asked about technical and scientific disciplines. How many English language novelists were there in the 19^th century? The answer has to be in the hundreds, maybe the high hundreds. How many of them have a readership today? The answer is in the low dozens even if you count rather minor or very flawed novels. How many made a serious difference in some way? The answer will also be in the low dozens, and not necessarily identical to the ones who have a readership today.

The Difference

AI today is probably capable of writing what is called genre fiction –fantasy, romance, noir, western, SF, etc. Romance fiction is already written by teams: one author writes a two page summary of a project, and another cranks out the detailed text. It seems certain that AI could perform part two of this process, but it also seems that AI also could do part one if fed the outlines of enough romance novels along with their full texts. Romance novels are not a field I have gone deep into, and I have no idea which romance novels stand out from the pack or “make a difference”, but could AI write a memorable romance novel of that kind? I ask seriously, and my own answer is “maybe”. I am slightly more familiar with science fiction and noir novels and their readership, and I know that readers who read one SF or noir novel every week will have their definite favorites, and these boil down to about 50 novels for the entire readership. Could AI add a novel to that group?

And still further you might ask: could AI produce a Balzac or a Jane Austen or a Melville or a James Joyce.

Individuals

Above I mentioned that scientific progress is not the work of rare geniuses but of collaboration and competition of large numbers of (usually well funded) individuals spread over several generations and over a large part of the world (in Newton’s case, from Khwarizm to England via Italy and Poland). All of these individuals will have their priors and prejudices and objectives, and the answer will be worked out in the process of collaboration and competition. (In the case of Newton’s physics, but not his alchemy, this process eliminated all of the Rosicrucian-type factors worked on by Giordano Bruno and others, and this is one of the reasons why Newton’s physics was triumphant, while his alchemy has been forgotten).

To date AI seems to have worked best on technical areas where a virtually infinite number of calculations need to be made, and in this way it is just a more advanced, more sophisticated, and much powerful version of earlier computers whose computing power already did things that individuals are incapable of. At the same time, as I understand, this only happens when AI’s instructions come from someone already expert in the field, and AI’s results are only usable after they have been vetted by someone of that description, though I believe that there is some question as to whether this kind of vetting is always possible. My questions are, in any case: Can AI be the one which raised questions and gives instructions to the AI which does he work.? (This is starting to look like an infinite regress again, like in some kinds of Philosophy of Mind). And secondly, can AI alone be the one who “makes a difference” the way Newton did?

My belief is that this might be possible if artificial AI individuals were created and put in communication wth one another – AI Copernicuses and Keplers and Galileos and Newtons, each with their own priors and working principles and standards and biases and intentions. In addition, when these AI individuals are put into communication with one another, there would have to be learning — e.g., an AI Galileo convincing an AI Newton that one of his working principles is destructive and should be discarded. (This is an artificial example not based on anything historical about Newton or Galileo, though this kind of thing had to have happened historically for science to have progressed the way it did.).

It wouldn’t be the matter of producing an AI Newton smarter than everyone else, but of producing a whole AI scientific tradition. And perhaps, once this stage were reached, AI science could progress without the need for human prompts, and an AI society of this type, made up of individuals with biases and standards, might make the kind of difference I was talking about. (On the other hand, the idea that this AI tradition would produce results that mere humans are incapable even of judging or understanding seems doubtful to me).

And to return to something I said earlier, this AI would not be the historic philosophical ideal of the purely rational thinker with no intentions or biases., but a society of intentional minds competing and collaborating within a set of shared standards.

CODA

Most of the actual and proposed applications of AI so far (retailing, inventory, routine boilerplate writing, commercial phone answering ) are sited within a completely conventional capitalist economy and labor market and don’t have much to do with the things I’ve been talking about, and still less do they hve anything to do with AGI (artificial general intelligence).

Bourdieu, Distinction (tr. Nice), Harvard, 1984 (French ed.1979).

NOTE: This is not careful discussion of Bourdieu, but just some things I’ve scavenged up while working my way through Distinction. This book was published almost 50 years ago in French but is extremely relevant to today’s America. If people had been reading Bourdieu all along, instead of wasting their time on Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, Deleuze, and their kind, I think that the response to Trump (and to Clinton and Obama) would have been much more effective.Bourdieu might be thought of as difficult, but most of what he says is ultimately intelligible in common-sense way, and he has none of the deliberate mystification that ruins most pomo books.

Bourdieu distinguishes two major classes, the dominant class and the dominated class. The dominated class consists of the working class, the lumpen, and the lower and middle middle class.

The dominant class can be divided into two groups. First, the dominant fraction of the dominant class – those who derive its status from property ownership, together with their allies in government. the military, and the media. Second, the dominated fraction of the dominant class– those who derive their status, instead of from financial capital, from “cultural capital” : education, credentialization, and the rather intangible qualities of dress, manners, etc. which mark someone as “classy” or superior.

This dominated fraction of the dominant class is what Trump (a leader of the dominant fraction) calls “the elite”. Others call it the intelligentsia (though it stretches all the way down to high school teachers) or the PMC (professional-managerial class). It includes most bureaucrats (including many private sector bureaucrats), everyone in education, science, or medicine except the owners of for-profit organizations, and almost everyone in entertainment except for the money people. (Within the university, the dominant fraction doeas have its allies: neoliberal economists, conservative political philosophers, international relations experts, etc).

A first advantage of this description of society is that it explains why nothing is ever done right. The serious decisions are always made by the dominant fraction, and their concerns are always financial. They pick and choose between the policy options offered up by the dominated fraction, and they reject those that are not profitable. Climatologists, for example, belong to the dominated fraction, and since few of their recommendations are profitable for the dominant fraction, none of them will be put into effect.

A second advantage is that it makes the Trump phenomenon more intelligible. The dominant fraction of the dominant class tends toward anti-intellectualism and is suspicious of the dominated fraction (PMC, intelligentsia, etc.) What Trump has done, in the service of the anti-intellectualism of the dominant section of the dominant class to which he belongs, is to play to the anti-intellectualism of much of the dominated class. And he is able to do this wonderfully, on the one hand because his education was poor, and on the other, because he acts in a deliberately crass and low-class way and lacks any of the intangible qualities which make someone “classy”.

***

Bourdieu refers back to the an old French distinction between the docte (the scholarly, the learned, the pedantic: the dominated dominant) and the mondaine (the worldly, the worldly-wise, the socialites: the dominant dominant), both of which had a high position in French society. The socialites were lacking in knowledge but got by on charm, flair, prestige, evasiveness, the unshakeeable self confidence of those born to high position, bullying, and bluff.

Trump relies on these “personal qualities” and bluff to an almost unimaginable degree. All the evidence is that he knows nothing about anything, but he’s a billionaire and President on the US and can say the most idiotic things with absolute confidence, and with the assurance that no one will contradict him to his face. But his crass version of “personal qualities”is unique to him.

“The accomplished socialite chooses his terrain, sidesteps difficulties, turns questions of knowledge into questions of preference and ignorance into disdainful refusal ….in other words, the lack of deep, methodical, systematic knowedge in a particular area of legitimate culture in no way prevents him from satisfying the cultural demands entailed in most social situations…. The Parisian or even provincial primary teacher, who can beat the small employer, the provincial doctor, or Parisian antique-dealer in the tests of pure knowledge, is likely to seem incomparably inferior to them in all situations which demand self-assurance or flair, or even the bluff which can cover lacunae, … [those who]are quite capable of covering their ignorance under the commonplaces of celebration or the knowing silence of a pout, a nod, or an inspire pose, …. [one can be remarkable misinformed ] and still hold one’s own in today’s most presitigious marketplaces — receptions, conferences, interviews, debates, committees, commissions– so long as one possesses the set of distinctive features, bearing, posture, presence, diction and pronunciation, manners, and usage, without which, in these markets at least, all scholastic knowledge is worth little or nothing and which, and partly because schools never, or never fully, teach them, define the essence of bourgeois distinction.”

–Bourdieu,”Distinction”, pp. 89, 99.

The peculiar thing about Trump is that he combines the socialite’s ignorance, unshakeable self-confidence, and willingness to bluff with the absence of any of the suave, genteel, gentlemanly traits that earlier dominant-dominant leaders had (e.g. George H W Bush). In place of bourgeois distinction, which alienates many, he has a crass and brutal version of the “common touch”, while still supporting the policies (deregulation, tax reduction, military intervention) central to the dominant-dominant political program. Genteel dominant-dominant bourgeois may be uncomfortable with his lack of bourgeois distinction, but his no-nonsense regular guy crassness and brutality make it possiblefor him to get things done. (George W. Bush, compared to his father,was a long step in the direction of theTrump style; so was Newt Gingtich,with his list of nasty words to call Democrats. This didn’t start with The Donald).

***

(The docte / mondaine distinction has been a factor in American education from the beginning. In the early 20^th century Ivy League colleges favored “well-rounded” students (usually athletes, or of good family, or both) over “grinds” (often Jews). This can clearly be seen in college novels of the time: Merriwell at Yale (a tremendously popular series), Stover at Yale (a sort of revisionist version of Merriwell) and above all Flandrau’s little-known Harvard Episodes — the best of the three, and probably the best college novel of all time. Flandrau’sbook (unlike the other two) gives a clear-eyed and very amusing picture of what the Ivy League then was really all about.)

***

There’s a lot of confusion about what a college degree really means nowadays, and Bourdieu explains it pretty well. The value of a degree, either as a path to a job or as a form of prestige, was a lot greater when 5% of the population graduated from college than it is now when a third or more of the population graduates from college. And the jobs education leads to can also be devalued, so that a schoolteacher nowadays is barely middle class.

I have seen the whole cycle of up valuation followed by down valuation at work in the career of one of my friends. He was a computer hobbyist already in 1967 and easily worked that into a prosperous career, but over the course of his life his skills were devalued and at retirement time he was glad to get out. At the beginning programmers could write their own ticket, but as time went on programming became just another job classification, and ultimately a rather poorly paid one.

By now people who go to school in order to”improve themselves” (whatever that means) are bitterly disappointed as often as not. The “promise of American life” is very often not kept.

“It is clear that what an academic qualification guarantees is much more than , and different from, the right to occupy a position and the capacity to perform the corresponding job. In this respect, the diploma is more like a patent of nobility than the title to property which strictly technical definitions make of it….[Well-connected people know] the right moment to pull out of devalued disciplines and careers and to switch into those with a future, rather than clinging to the scholastic values which secured the highest profits in in an earlier stage of the market… The collective disillusionment which results foom the structural mismatch between aspirations and real probabilities, between the social identity that the school system seems to promise, or the one it offers on a temporary basis,, and the social identity that the labor market in fact offers, is the source for some of the disaffection towards work , that refusal of social finitude, which penetrates all the refusals and negations of the adolescent counter-culture.”

— Bourdieu, Distinction, p.142,144

***

“The petit bourgeois do not know how to play the game of culture as a game. They take culture too seriously to go in for the bluff or imposture or even for the distance and casualness which show true familiarity, too seriously to escape permanent fear of ignorance or blunders, or to sidestep tests by responding with the indifference of those who are not competing or the serene detachment of those who feel entitled to confess or even flaunt their lacunae. Identifying culture with knowledge, they think that the cultivated man is one who possesses an immense fund of knowledge ….”

Bourdieu, Distinction, p.330

This made me think of the New York Intellectuals and Susan Sontag,whose overseriousness I used to attribute to their involvement in German culture, but which might be the result of the fact that they all were interlopers wh did not come from an established cultural background and did not have the ease and bluffing skills that would come with tht. (Though one of them, Edmund Wilson, actually did come from such a background, and I think he he stands out as an exception).

Bourdieu would probably count Americans of that time as petit bourgeois by definition, since very few of us back then had the self-confidence and ease coming from several generations at Oxford, Cambridge, or the Sorbonne.

***

[The new ethical avant-garde] “urges a morality of pleasure as a duty. This doctrine makes it a failure, a threat to self-esteem, not to “have fun”…. Pleasure is not only permitted but demanded, on ethical as much as scientific grounds….” [The modernist morality] “transmutes a spuriously positive definition of “normal” into an imperative of normality and bases the orgasm-duty of its theoretical morality on the findings of a bogus science of mores à la Kinsey, thus introducing the deadly, rational accountancy of equivalences into the area of sexual exchanges…”.

— Bourdieu, Distinction, p.367 ).

Yesterday morning was quite an ordeal for a refined girl because all of the newspapers all printed the story of how Henry and I are engaged to one another, but they all seemed to leave out the part about me being a society girl except one newspaper, and that was the newspaper that quoted what Dorothy said about me being a debutant at the Elk’s Carnival. So I called up Dorothy at the Ritz and I told Dorothy that a girl like she ought to keep her mouth closed in the presents of reporters.

So it seems that quite a lot of reporters kept calling Dorothy up but Dorothy said she really did not say anything to any of them except one reporter asked her what I used for money and she told him buttons. But Dorothy really should not have said such a thing, because quite a few people seem to know that Mr. Eisman is educating me and that he is known all over Chicago as Gus Eisman the Button King, so one thing might [183]suggest another until people’s minds might begin to think something.

But Dorothy said that she did not say anything more about me being a debutant at Little Rock, because after all Dorothy knows that I really did not make any debut in Little Rock, because just when it was time to make my debut, my gentleman friend Mr. Jennings became shot, and after the trial was over and all of the Jury had let me off, I was really much to fatigued to make any debut.

So then Dorothy said, why don’t we throw a party now and you can become a debutant now and put them all in their place, because it seems that Dorothy is dying for a party. So that is really the first sensible suggestion that Dorothy has made yet, because I think that every girl who is engaged to a gentleman who has a fine old family like Henry, had really ought to be a debutant. So I told her to come right over and we would plan my debut but we would keep it very, very quiet and give it tomorrow night, because if Henry heard I was making my debut he would come up from Pennsylvania and he would practically spoil the party, because all Henry has to do to spoil a party is to arrive at it. [184]

So Dorothy came over and we planned my debut. So first we decided to have some engraved invitations engraved, but it always takes quite a little time to have invitations engraved, and it would really be foolish because all of the gentlemen we were going to invite to my debut were all members of the Racquet Club, so I could just write out a notice that I was having a debut and give it to Willie Gwynn and have Willie Gwynn post it on the Racquet Club board.

So Willie Gwynn posted it on the club board and then he called me up and he told me that he had never seen so much enthusiasm since the Dempsey-Firpo fight, and he said that the whole Racquet Club would be there in a body. So then we had to plan about what girls we would ask to my debut. Because I have not seemed to meet so many society women yet because of course a girl does not meet society women until her debut is all over, and then all the society women all come and call on a debutant. But I know practically all of the society men, because practically all of the society men belong to the Racquet club, so after I have the Racquet Club at my debut, all I have to do to take [185]my real place in society is to meet their mothers and sisters, because I know practically all of their sweethearts now.

But I always seem to think that it is delightful to have quite a lot of girls at a party, if a girl has quite a lot of gentlemen at a party, and it is quite delightful to have all the girls from the Follies, but I really could not invite them because, after all, they are not in my set. So then I thought it all over and I thought that even if it was not etiquette to invite them to a party, it really would be etiquette to hire them to come to a party and be entertainers, and after they were entertainers they could mix in to the party and it really would not be a social error.

So then the telephone rang and Dorothy answered it and it seems that it was Joe Sanguinetti, who is almost the official bootlegger for the whole Racquet Club, and Joe said he had heard about my debut and if he could come to my debut and bring his club which is the Silver Spray Social Club of Brooklyn, he would supply all of the liquor and he would guarantee to practically run the rum fleet up to the front door. [186]

So Dorothy told him he could come, and she hung up the telephone before she told me his proposition, and I became quite angry with Dorothy because, after all, the Silver Spray Social Club is not even mentioned in the Social Register and it has no place at a girl’s debut. But Dorothy said by the time the party got into swing, anyone would have to be a genius if he could tell whether he belonged to the Racquet Club, the Silver Spray Social Club, or the Knights of Pythias. But I really was almost sorry that I asked Dorothy to help plan my debut, except that Dorothy is very good to have at a party if the police come in, because Dorothy always knows how to manage the police, and I never knew a policeman yet who did not finish up by being madly in love with Dorothy. So then Dorothy called up all of the reporters on all of the newspapers and invited them all to my debut, so they could see it with their own eyes.

So Dorothy says that she is going to see to it that my debut lands on the front page of all of the newspapers, if we have to commit a murder to do it. [187]

June 19th:

Well, it has been three days since my debut party started but I finally got tired and left the party last night and went to bed because I always seem to lose all of my interest in a party after a few days, but Dorothy never loses her interest in a party and when I woke up this morning Dorothy was just saying goodbye to some of the guests. I mean Dorothy seems to have quite a lot of vitality, because the last guests of the party were guests we picked up when the party went to take a swim at Long Beach the day before yesterday, and they were practically fresh, but Dorothy had gone clear through the party from beginning to end without even stopping to go to a Turkish bath as most of the gentlemen had to do. So my debut has really been very novel, because quite a lot of the guests who finished up at my debut were not the same guests that started out at it, and it is really quite novel for a girl to have so many different kinds of gentlemen at her debut. So it has really been a very great success because all of the newspapers have quite a lot of write-ups about my debut and I really felt quite proud when I saw the front [188]page of the Daily Views and it said in large size headlines, “LORELEI’S DEBUT A WOW!” And Zits’ Weekly came right out and said that if this party marks my entrance into society, they only hope that they can live to see what I will spring once I have overcome my debutant reserve and taken my place in the world.

So I really had to apologise to Dorothy about asking Joe Sanguinetti to my debut because it was wonderful the way he got all of the liquor to the party and he more than kept his word. I mean he had his bootleggers run up from the wharf in taxis, right to the apartment, and the only trouble he had was, that once the bootleggers delivered the liquor, he could not get them to leave the party. So finally there was quite a little quarrel because Willie Gwynn claimed that Joe’s bootleggers were snubbing the members of his club because they would not let the boys from the Racquet club sing in their quartet. But Joe’s bootleggers said that the Racquet club boys wanted to sing songs that were unrefined, while they wanted to sing songs about Mother. So then everybody started to take sides, but the girls from the Follies were all [189]with Joe’s bootleggers from the start because practically all we girls were listening to them with tears steaming from our eyes. So that made the Racquet club jealous and one thing led to another until somebody rang for an ambulants and then the police came in.

So Dorothy, as usual, won over all of the police. So it seems that the police all have orders from Judge Schultzmeyer, who is the famous judge who tries all of the prohibition cases, that any time they break into a party that looks like it was going to be a good party, to call him up no matter what time of the day or night it is, because Judge Schultzmeyer dearly loves a party. So the Police called up Judge Schultzmeyer and he was down in less than no time. So during the party both Joe Sanguinetti and Judge Schultzmeyer fell madly in love with Dorothy. So Joe and the Judge had quite a little quarrel and the Judge told Joe that if his stuff was fit to drink he would set the Law after him and confiscate it, but his stuff was not worth the while of any gentleman to confiscate who had any respect for his stomach, and he would not lower himself to confiscate it. So along about nine o’clock [190]in the morning Judge Schultzmeyer had to leave the party and go to court to try all of the criminals who break all of the laws, so he had to leave Dorothy and Joe together and he was very very angry. And I really felt quite sorry for any person who went up before Judge Schultzmeyer that morning, because he gave everybody 90 days and was back at the party by twelve o’clock. So then he stuck to the party until we were all going down to Long Beach to take a swim day before yesterday when he seemed to become unconscious, so we dropped him off at a sanitorium in Garden City.

Copeland and Day, Boston. 1897
First edition (3500 copies) November, 1897
Second edition (5000 copies) December, 18

“The Chance”
(Chapter One)

Two men were talking in a room in Claverly Hall. Horace Hewitt, the sophomore who owned the apartment, had passed, during the hour with his visitor, from the state in which conversation is merely a sort of listless chaffing to where it becomes eager, earnest, and perplexing. The other, a carefully dressed, somewhat older young man, across whose impassive, intellectual profile a pair of eyeglasses straddled gingerly, was not, perhaps, monopolising more than his share of the discussion, for Robinson Curtiss was the kind of person to whom a large conversational portion was universally conceded; but he was, without doub , talking with a continuance and an air of authority that unconsciously had become relentless. Both men were smoking: Hewitt, a sallow meerschaum pipe, with his class in raised letters on the bowl; Curtiss, a cigarette he had taken from the metal case he still held meditatively in his hand. He smoked exceedingly good cigarettes, and practised the thrifty art of always discovering just one in his case.

“So you think my college life from an undergraduate’s standpoint, and it’s the only standpoint I give that for,”–Hewitt snapped his fingers impatiently,–“will always be as much of a fizzle as it has so far?” He had jumped up from the big chair in which he had all along been sprawling and stood before Robinson in an attitude that was at once incredulous and despairing. The momentary embarrassment that Curtiss felt at this unexpected show of feeling on the part of his young friend, took the form of extreme deliberation in returning his cigarette-case tohis pocket, and in repeating the performance of lighting his cigarette that had not gone out.

He had not been a graduate quite three years in all, but that had been ample time–particularly as it had been spent far from Cambridge—for the readjustment of certain views of his,–views in which four eventful years at college had been grotesquely prominent. He found, on returning to the university town, that his absence rendered him frequently indifferent to the genuineness and importance, not merely of the more delicate problems of the undergraduate world,–it was one of these on which he was at the present moment indiscreetly touching,–but even to the obvious and common incidents of the academic experience: to the outcome of examinations, to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. It was not until Hewitt stood troubled and expectant before him that Curtiss appreciated how tactless the disparity in their knowledge of things collegiate had made him appear to his young friend. A sudden reminiscent intuition, that flashed him back to his own sophomore year, caused him to feel that what he was saying to Hewitt was almost brutal; in his capacity of a young graduate he had indulged in a cold-blooded lecture (it could hardly be called a discussion) on questions that very properly were not questions to a fellow in Hewitt’s situation, but warm, operative realities. Hewitt was in many ways such a mature young person, his valuation of other people and their actions had always seemed so temperate, so just, that Curtiss, without knowing it, had simply ignored the fellow’s healthy undergraduate attitude. He had failed to assume how eager the sophomore was to be some active part of the new and fascinating life going on everywhere about him; how completely he was possessed by the indefinable, disquieting, stimulative spirit that so triumphantly inhibits Harvard from becoming a mere place of learning. Curtiss had spent the evening in throwing what he sincerely believed was a searching light on some aspects of Harvard life; he was beginning to wish he had allowed Hewitt to perform the office for himself.

“Be honest with me, Curtiss.” Hewitt spoke in the distinct, simple tones that as a rule accompany words one hesitates to trifle with. “You’ve gone through the whole damn thing yourself, and got more out of it—not more than you deserve, of course, but more than most men get; you knew everybody and belonged to–to–” Hewitt hesitated a moment; any single college institution–social, athletic, or intellectual–did not in itself forcibly appeal to him; there was something petty in particularising. “You belonged to–to everything, when you were in college,” he finally said; “how was it done–how is it done every day? I see it going on around me all the time; but I can’t touch it in any way,–it never comes near enough, if you know what I mean; and what I can’t explain to myself is that I don’t see why it should come any nearer to me,–only, I want it to.” The manner in which Horace blurted out the last few words was an epitome of the situation; their confession of keen longing to know and be known in his class had gathered intensity with the growing suspicion that certain conditions of the place–conditions he felt rather than understood–were every day making the realisation of his desire for activity, acquaintances, friendship, more impossible. His great common sense–in Hewitt the quality amounted to a sort of prosaic talent–would always preclude his degenerating into one of the impotently rebellious; it had kept him free from the slightest tinge of bitterness toward any one, but it had not made his interminable, solitary walks up Brattle Street (ther e was apparently no other walk to take in Cambridge) less interminable; it had enlivened none of the stolid evenings in his rooms which, with a necessary amount of study, a chapter or two from some book he did not much care about, and a bottle of beer, always came to an end somehow or other in spite of themselves; it had not invested stupid theatres with interest, nor mediocre athletics with excitement. Common sense, the prevailing trait of Hewitt’s character, that induced the middle-aged to consider him “singularly well balanced for a young man,” was quite powerless to dispel the desperate loneliness of his sophomore year. His common sense was a coat of mail that defied sabre thrusts, perhaps, but let in the rain.

“You know everything, Rob,” Hewitt smiled; he had after all no wish to appear emotional. “Is there something the matter with me, or with Harvard, that has kept me what you very well know I am–an isolated nonentity who has rather begun to lose hope? Are there other fellows in college who are gentlemen, and used to all the word implies, but who might be in any one of the fifteen leading universities of Kansas, for all the good they are getting out of this place? If I had only been given a chance–” he broke out with sudden vehemence,–“a good, square chance, the kind a man has a right to expect when he enters college—to meet my equals equally–to make myself felt and liked if I had the power to, why I shouldn’t mind failing, you know, not in the least; a man who isn’t an ass accepts chronic unpopularity as he does chronic red hair, or any other personal calamity.” Hewitt’s own locks had sufficient colour to lend authority to his statement. “It isn’t that–it’s the utter impossibility, as far as I can see, of a boy who came here as I did, getting a fair trial. Every day I am more and more convinced that my prospects for the broad, enlightening sort of existence I expected to find on entering Harvard were about as definite and as brilliant as the prospects of a stillborn child on entering the world. What’s the matter? What’s wrong? Who’s to blame?”

There was an admirable force to Hewitt’s manner when he was thoroughly in earnest that, as a rule, roused even in Curtiss a vague apprehension that sincerity was, somehow, obligatory. It did not restrain him, owever, from assuming an expression of mock helplessness and murmuring,– “It’s so long–so intricate.” “If people only knew what they were in for before they came,” Hewitt continued.

“Maybe they wouldn’t come,” suggested the other.

“Of course they’d come,–the place is too great,–they couldn’t afford to stay away.” Horace passed over the axioms with the impatience of one who has problems to solve. “Of course they would come,” he repeated; “but they would come with their eyes opened–they would know what not to expect; that’s the important thing.”

“Ah, but who could do it? Who would do it? It would be like assisting a new kitten to see by means of a pin. We must all work out our own salvations,” Curtiss added sententiously.

“That brings it right round to my point again,” exclaimed Hewitt. “Of course every man wants to ‘work out his own salvation,’ as you put it; but at Harvard I don’t think it’s every man who is given the opportunity to. He doesn’t know that before he comes, he doesn’t find it out for some time after he gets here; but it’s true, and it’s precisely what I want you to tell me about–to explain.” There was but a faint note of triumph in Hewitt’s voice; he realised that he had Curtiss in a corner, but he had not been conscious of manœuvring to get him there. “Tell me this: Do you think that Harvard–and by that I don’t mean the Officers of Instruction and Government, they’re the least of it–do you think that Harvard is fair, and do you think that it is American?”

There was something so general, so meaningless, so s enatorial in the application of Hewitt’s final word that Curtiss was surprised into a shout of laughter.

“Whether it’s fair or not, depends on who’s telling you about it,” he said gravely enough; “but there’s no question as to its nationality,” he laughed again; “of course it’s American, horribly American, deliciously American!”

Hewitt puckered his forehead and waited for more; he did not in the least understand.

“When I say American, I don’t mean what you mean; because–pardon me for saying it–you don’t mean anything.” Curtiss found it suddenly easy to rattle on as he had been doing earlier in the evening; his laugh had cleared the atmosphere. “My dear fellow,” he said, “Harvard University possesses its labouring class, its middle class, and its aristocracy, as sharply, as inevitably, as–as–” he was about to draw a rather over-emphatic comparison between Harvard and the social orders of Sparta in the days of Lycurgus, when Hewitt, still puzzled, broke in with,–

“But if that’s the case, it isn’t American at all–you contradict yourself in the same breath.”

“I assumed that you knew more about your own country,” Curtiss remarked with dry superiority; “I sha’n’t undertake to discuss the social system of the United States; it would simply necessitate my going over a lot of platitudes that would bore us both. It’s only when we apply to our college, what we all know to be so undeniable of the country at large, that the situation at once becomes novel and preposterous to so many people. The conventional idea of an American college–you know this because the idea was yours before you came here–is that it consists of a multitude of lusty young men linked together by the indissoluble bonds of class and college, all striving, shoulder to shoulder, for the same ends, in a general way,–just what the ends are I don’t think the public cares very much, but they’re presumably charmingly unpractical and fine,–and living in an intoxicating atmosphere of intimacy, a robust sense of loyalty that is supposed to pervade the academic groves and render them the temporary home of a great, light-hearted, impulsive, congenial brotherhood. Well, I don’t know whether other American institutions of learning answer the description, because I’ve never been to them; but Harvard doesn’t, not in the slightest particular.”

“Then I wish it wouldn’t attempt to,” murmured Hewitt.

“There is no attempt,” answered Curtiss; “there is merely a pretence,–a pretence that, strangely enough, isn’t meant to deceive anyone. We find it in the naïve untruthfulness of the college papers, in the eloquent conventionality of the Class Day Orators; the college press prattles about ‘class feeling’ and all the other feelings that none of us, since the place has grown so large, has ever felt; the orator’s sentiments bear about the same relation to real life that his gestures do: he has a lot to say about everybody’s sitting together at the feet of the Alma Mater; but he doesn’t dwell at all on those of us who have been cuddled in her lap. That’s what I mean when I say the place is consistently ‘American.’” Curtiss got up and took a meditative turn about the room. “The undergraduate body faithfully reproduces, in little, the social orders of the whole country, and not only never formally recognises their existence, but takes occasion, every now and then, somewhat elaborately, to deny it,–a proceeding that of course doesn’t change any one’s position or make any one happier. ‘Fine words,’ indeed, never ‘buttered the parsnips’ of so sophisticated a crowd as you discover at Harvard; but if an American community finds it impossible, by reason of all the thousand and one artificial conditions that make such things impossible, to be ‘free and equal,’ what is left for the distracted concern to do, but flaunt its freedom and its equality, from time to time, in theory?”

“It’s all wrong then–frightfully wrong,” declared Hewitt, with considerable heat. He had been increasingly irritated through the calm progress of Curtiss’s discourse, and now stood with his back to the fire-place, staring fixedly before him,–a spirited figure of protest. “We’re too young at college for that kind of rot,” he went on emphatically; “where, in the name of Heaven, can a fellow expect square treatment, if it isn’t right here among what, just now, you scornfully called ‘a multitude of lusty young men’? They ought to be too young and too lusty and too good fellows to care–even to know about—about–all that.” His words tumbled out noisily, and had the effect of noticeably increasing Robinson’s deliberateness.

“The situation would be in no way remarkable, if it were not for just that fact,–our extreme youth.” Curtiss spoke as if he were still in college. “It’s taken rather for granted that young men, who are delightful in so many ways, are the complete embodiment, when chance herds them together, of the ‘hale-fellow-well-met-God-bless-everybody’ ideal a lot of people seem to have of them. The plain truth of the matter is, that at Harvard, at least, they aren’t at all. Wander a moment from the one royal road we all try to prance along in common here, and you’ll find most of us picking our way in very much the same varied paths we are destined to follow later on. The only wonder is that we should have found them so soon. What makes people’s hair stand on end is that young America should begin to classify himself so instinctively–the crystallisation of the social idea seems, to put it mildly, a trifle premature. But”–Curtiss’s shrug comprehended many things–“what are you going to do about it?”

The question was perfectly general in intention, and might have ended the discussion had not Hewitt regarded it as the natural expression of Curtiss’s interest in his ambitions for a more diverting existence.

“And yet, after all, I am a gentleman as well as they,” he said simply.

There was something exquisitely intelligible to the graduate in the very vagueness of the boy’s pronoun. “They,”–he too, in the early forlornness of his college life, had been eagerly aware of them,–the great creatures, who, for some reason or other (not always a transparent one), seemed to emerge with such enviable distinction from the vast mediocrity of the crowd; “They” who put on astonishing black coats and spent Sunday afternoon in town; “They” who so frequently wore little crimson usher’s badges at the games, and bowed to so many of the attractive people they showed to their seats; “They” who, fine shouldered and brown from rowing on the crews, seemed to endure their education with such splendid listlessness; “They” whom he had so often heard rattling into the suburban stillness of Cambridge just before dawn, from some fine dance in town. How unmistakable they were in the class-room, at a football game, the theatre,–everywhere; how instinctively they seemed to know one another, and how inevitably they came to be felt in every class as something, if not exactly apart, at least aloof. Curtiss stared musingly at the fire a moment, and smiled as he recalled the various trivial circumstances that, in his own case, gradually, and with none of the excitement of a conscious transition, had brought about the substitution of a perfectly natural, matter-of-fact “We,” for the once tacitly understood but exasperating “They.” For a moment he thought of asking Hewitt to explain himself; he had a freakish desire to see the fellow flounder in the effort to be clear, without becoming pitifully transparent; however, he thought better of it, and only answered with some impatience,–

“Of course you’re as much of a gentleman as any one; but that—except very, very superficially–isn’t the question.” Curtiss was beginning to feel like a hoary old oracle. “There’s nothing strange or tragic in your situation; it’s shared by lots of other fellows in college,” he went on; “you slipped into Harvard as soon as your tutor thought you were ready to, and, as you came from a rather obscure place, you slipped in quite alone. A year and a half have dragged themselves through the vagaries of the Cambridge climate; you are still, broadly speaking, quite alone. Yet all this time you have been sensitive–keenly so–to the life that is being lived everywhere around you, and you begin to feel about as essential to the drama as a freshman does when he puts on a somewhat soiled court costume and assists Sir Henry Irving in one of his interesting productions. The trouble with you and every one like you is simply this: you didn’t come to Harvard from a preparatory school with a lot of acquaintances and some friends; you didn’t come from any of the few big towns that annually send a number of fellows who know, or who at least have heard, of one another; you are athletic, perhaps, but scarcely what one would call an athlete–although I confess, that isn’t of much consequence; we don’t, as a rule, reward athletes for being athletes. If they perform well, we applaud them. At Harvard, athletics are occasionally a means to a man’s becoming identified with the sort of people he wishes to be one of; but I have never known them to be an end. Finally, you are not a Bostonian, and when I say ‘a Bostonian,’”–Curtiss removed his glasses and softly polished them with his handkerchief,–“when I say ‘a Bostonian,’” he repeated with the gentlest of satire, “I mean of course a Bostonian that one knows.”**

“Now, although you are doubtless a great many interesting and attractive things, you do not happen to be any one of those I have just named; and it is from the men who are, that the crowd destined to be of importance in college–the fellows who are going to lead, who are going to be felt–whatever you choose to call it–will generally originate. Think of your own class for a moment, and, nine times out of ten, the men that you feel would be congenial as well as interesting, if you knew them, are taken from the sort of men I’ve specified.”

“Nine times out of ten!” Hewitt laughed hopelessly, “who the devil is the tenth man?”

“Why, you are, of course,–or you will be,” said Curtiss, gaily. “I was myself, once upon a time. It’s good fun too; my little ‘boom’ was a trifle belated–the tenth man’s usually is; but it only seems to make the more noise for going off all by itself; while it lasts you almost feel as if people were being superlatively nice to you in order to make up for lost time. Nine times out of ten though”–the sweeping phrase was beginning to assume the dignity of a formula–“it’s the other way. The ‘tenth man’ at Harvard would never have escaped from his obscurity and comparative isolation to become the ** ‘tenth man,’ if it were not for something that seems very much like chance.”

“How is a fellow going to find his chance in a place like this?” Hewitt exclaimed scornfully. “Do you suppose, if I knew where to look for it, that I wouldn’t run out to meet it more than half way?”

“Unfortunately it’s the chances that usually seek the introduction,” answered Robinson, oracularly.

“You mean to say then, in all seriousness, that a man–a gentleman—who comes here as I did, has no reason to expect that, as a matter of course, his friends will be the kind of people he’s been used to at home; that instead of at once finding his own level, he has to sit twirling his thumbs and waiting for the improbable to happen–which it perhaps doesn’t do in the course of four years?” Hewitt was scornful, incredulous, defiant.

“He is at perfect liberty to hope,” said the graduate, quietly; “but I can’t see that he has the slightest reason to expect. As for ‘twirling his thumbs,’ I think he might be better employed if he spent his spare time in going in for foot-ball and glee clubs and the ‘Lampoon’ and the hundred yards’ dash, and all that sort of thing; they bring your name before the college public–make you known and definite, and in that way widen the possibilities.”

“Then I can’t see that college is very different from any place else–from the outside world,” said Hewitt, disappointedly. Curtiss had taken considerable pains to tell him as much some time before; but with Hewitt mere information frequently failed in its mission; he was the sort of person whom to convince, one was first obliged to ensnare into believing that he had arrived at conviction unaided.

“No, it isn’t different; that is to say, Harvard isn’t,” assented Curtiss; “except that it is smaller, younger and possesses its distinctly local atmosphere.”

“Then coming here, under certain circumstances, may be like going to a strange town and living in a hotel.”

“Both ventures have been known to resemble each other.”

“And it’s about as sensible to suppose that your fellow students are going to take any notice of you, as it would be to expect people you had never met to lean out of their front windows and ask you to dinner if you were to stroll down the Avenue some fine evening.” Hewitt’s manner had become grim and facetious.

“You seem to have grasped the elements of the situation,” said Curtiss.

“The system is certainly unique,” mused Hewitt.

“Yes,” answered Robinson, “other colleges have societies; whereas Harvard unquestionably has Society.”

“Do you consider the place snobbish then?” asked Horace.

The graduate thought a moment before answering. “I object to the word,” he said at last; “it’s as easy to say, as vague and denunciatory, as ‘vulgar’ or ‘selfish’ or any of those hardworked terms we apply to other people; you can only say that, making some necessary allowances for a few purely local customs, Harvard society is influenced, or guided, or governed, as you please to express it, by about the same conventions that obtain in other civilised communities. Lots of people who have only a newspaper acquaintance with the place think that wealth is the only requisite here. They have an affection for the phrase ‘a rich man’s college,’–whatever that may mean. But of course all that is absurd to any one who has spent four years in the place, and has known all the fellows with no allowances to speak of who are welcome in pretty much everything; and has seen all the bemillioned nonentities who languish through college in a sort of richly upholstered isolation. ‘Birth’ is certainly not the open sesame; a superficial inquiry into the shop and inn keeping antecedents of some of our most prominent and altogether charming brothers, smashes that little illusion. I’m not a sociologist, and I don’t pretend to know what constitutes society with a big S—to put it vulgarly–here or any place else. But there is such a thing here more than in any other college. An outsider, hearing me talk this way, would say I was making an unnecessarily large mountain out of a very ordinary molehill. But that’s because he wouldn’t understand that Society at Harvard is really the most important issue in undergraduate life. The comparatively few men who compose it, have it in their power to take hold of anything they choose to be interested in, and run it according to their own ideasz**–which shows the value of even a rather vague form of organisation. Fortunately, their ideas are good ones,–clean and manly. You all find out the truth of this, sooner or later. Then if you haven’t a good time, I suppose you can go away and call the place snobbish–lots of people do.”

“I don’t think that’s my style exactly, and I wish you wouldn’t take that tone about it. I want to know fellows, of course: fellows like Philip Haydock and Endicott Davis and Philip Irving and ‘Peter’ Bradley and Sherman and Prescott,” said Hewitt, frankly, naming six of the most prominent men in his class; “but I can’t imagine myself thinking worse of any of them if—if–”

“If you never do get to know them,” Curtiss broke in; “if your chance fails to materialise–if, after all, you are not the ‘tenth man.’” He got up as if to leave.

“I wish you wouldn’t go,” said the other, earnestly; “there ’re lots of things I want to ask you about. What have men like Bradley and Davis ever done here to be what they are?” he went on hurriedly.

“Ask me something hard,” laughed Curtiss, giving Hewitt his overcoat to hold for him. “They haven’t ‘done’ anything,” he continued, struggling into his sleeves; “I don’t suppose they would know how to. Fellows like Bradley and Davis simply arrive at Harvard when they are due, to fill, in their characteristic way, the various pleasant places that have been waiting the last two hundred and fifty years for them. From the little I’ve seen of them, I should say that these particular two happen to be the kind it would be a pleasure to know anywhere, which isn’t always the case with the ‘Bradleys’ and the ‘Davises’ of college. So, of course, you want to know them,” he ended, emphatically. “What we’ve been calling your ‘chance’ literally consists in fellows like these holding out their hands and saying simply, ‘Come and see me.’” As Curtiss said this, he impressively extended his own hand; Hewitt shook it, absently, and began with some abruptness to talk of other things.

He was, all at once, exceedingly glad that his guest was saying good-night. It was a positive relief to hear his footsteps resounding in the long corridor outside, and to feel the slight tremor of the building as the massive front door closed with a thump; for Curtiss had become, although perhaps unwillingly, that most objectionable person, the recipient of one’s impulsive confidence.

After he had gone, Hewitt stood a moment, looking undecidedly at the glass clock on his mantelpiece. It was long after midnight, and he was n the state of mind when even the oblivion of bed is numbered among sweet but unattainable ambitions. He was tired of his own room; the good taste that had been expended on it had, of late, begun to strike him as inexpressibly futile. Yet there was scarcely any one on whom he could drop in, even at a reasonable time of night, with the objectless familiarity of college intercourse, to say nothing of calling out under a lighted window in the small hours of the morning. He, of course, belonged to no college club, so his evening expeditions were of necessity limited by the theatres in town, or the listless thoroughfares of Cambridge. He often took long, aimless strolls through streets he barely looked at, and whose names he didn’t know. It was with the intention of walking now, that he put on a cap, turned out the lights, and left his room.

The season was that which precedes the first atmospheric intimations of spring. The snow had gone, and the ground was dry, and everything that was shabby and stark and colourless in Cambridge was admitting its inestimable obligation in the past to the loveliness of foliage. There was little of the sympathetic mystery of night in the long street in which Hewitt found himself on leaving his building; its lines of irregular wooden houses, aggressive with painty reflections of the dazzling arc-lights swung at intervals overhead, stretched away in distinct and uninviting perspective. Except where the gaslit sidestreets yawned murkily down to the river, Cambridge was hideous in the rectilinear nakedness of March. The university town is, as a rule, so very still after twelve o’clock that its occasional sounds come to have an individuality to one who prowls about, that the sounds of day do not possess. Intent as he was in pondering over the disheartening things Curtiss had been saying to him, Hewitt’s ears were keen, as he sauntered up the street with his hands in his pockets, to all the night noises he had learned to know so well. A student in a ground-floor room ablaze with light was reading aloud. Horace stopped a moment, and laughed at the sleepy voice droning wearily through the open window,–some one was taking his education hard. A policeman, half a block ahead of him, was advancing slowly down the street by a series of stealthy disappearances into shadowed doorways; Hewitt could hear him rattle the doorknobs before he emerged again to glitter a moment under the electric light; a car that had left town at half-past twelve was thumping faintly alongsomewhere between Boston and the Square–it might have been a great distance away, so intensely still was the intervening suburb; and through all the flat, silent streets the night air, cool and pungent with the damp of salt marshes, blew gently up from the Charles and intensified the atmosphere of emptiness.

Naturally enough, Hewitt’s sense of isolation was far less on these solitary rambles of his, than when he jostled elbows in crowded class-rooms with fellows who, he felt, were potentially his friends, at the same time that he was realising how utterly excluded he was from their schemes of life. Morbidness was foreign to a nature like his; and yet, as time went on, he had been forced to regard Cambridge as most satisfactory when deserted and asleep. It was only then that the forlorn feeling of being no essential part of his surroundings often left him; and although he recognised the weakness of strolling away from unpleasant truths, the altogether unlooked-for state of affairs at college had cowed him into temporary helplessness. That this furtive condition was temporary, even he himself was in a measure aware; one cannot but feel at college that after a certain time has passed, one’s fellows, in spite of the plasticity of youth, become, if not solid, at least viscous, in the moulds that have received them. There is an uneasy period of ebullition in which boys try very hard to enjoy the things that they do, in the absence of the self-poise that enables them to do what they eventually find they enjoy. Intimacies are formed and broken; habits are acquired and not broken; there is a weighing and a levelling, and at last, toward the end of one’s sophomore year, almost everybody has been made or marred or overlooked.

It was an intuition of something of this kind that led Hewitt, in his more thoughtful moods, to realise that he was having his worst time now. The great, ill-assorted crowd that technically composed his “class” would shift and change and finally become, not satisfied, perhaps, with the various combinations it had evolved, but certainly used to them. After that, life at Harvard, Hewitt told himself, would be simplified for him; the time for identifying one’s self with the companions of one’s choice would have come and gone; he would find himself standing alone. His future development would not be just what he had expected; but there was peace in the thought that his position would be definite, unalterable, and then, after all, he would be standing, and not running away, as in the past year he had been so often tempted to do. Although anything but a student, he could even fancy himself ploughing doggedly in self-defence through an incredible number of courses in history, or some such subject, and at the end pleasing his family with two or three Latin words of a laudatory nature on his degree. Hewitt was too thinking and too just a person not to have frequently contrasted his own condition with that of fellows one occasionally heard about, who starved their way through college on sums that would have made scarcely an impression on his room-rent; their persistent “sandiness” compelled his admiration; more than once he had given substantial expression to it.

But it was at best a very theoretical sort of consolation that came from a knowledge of the depressing fact that many of his most deserving classmates neither ate nor bathed. His unhappiness differed in kind, but not in reality. Although he appreciated how easy and foolish it was to assume the “chance” the graduate had dwelt on with such apparent authority, and then let loose an imagination that had been nourished for so long on nothing more satisfying than itself, he, nevertheless, could not help projecting himself into some of the delightful possibilities of that chance. As he loafed through sleeping Cambridge, he pictured himself under a variety of circumstances playing parts neither fanciful nor egoistic, but strikingly unlike the one he had been cast for. The common-place incident of being joined in the College Yard by two or three friends on their way to the same lecture, made his heart beat faster to think of; the thought of starting off for an evening in town with a crowd of fellows–like those talkative groups he so often saw after dinner, waiting impatiently on the corner for a bridge car–stirred him to a mild, pleasant sort of excitement. He even held imaginary conversations with Haydock and Davis and Bradley and the rest of them, in which he modestly refrained from saying all the good things,–conversations in which these classmates of his emerged, became individuals, and for an hour seemed glad to be numbered among Hewitt’s acquaintance. With his exhaustive knowledge of what might happen to a boy at college, he liked to imagine himself in the position where friends and influence are synonymous, constantly keeping fresh the memory of his own dreary experience, and taking infinite joy in quietly extricating others from a similar one.

When Hewitt returned to Claverly by a circuitous way through the College Yard, and out again into the empty triangular Square, he found a dumpy, patient-looking **herdic cab drawn up to the curbstone. The driver had tucked away his money somewhere in the region of his portly waist, and was pulling his coat over the spot, preparatory to mounting the box.

But the tall young man in evening dress, who apparently had just paid him, had not yet turned to pass through the brightly lighted doorway.Hewitt, noting the overcoat that lay limp and unheeded on the sidewalk, and the almost imperceptible uncertainty of the young fellow’s neat, boyish back in its conscious equilibrium, stopped to give that second and more searching look one always gives a drunken man, however usual the spectacle of drunkenness. They both stood there a moment: Hewitt half way up the stone steps of the building, the other with his back turned, swaying gently on the walk below, as if listening to the diminishing clatter of the shabby little cab. Horace scarcely knew why he himself lingered over an affair so personal and so manifestly not his own. He found justification for his curiosity, however,–although it was characteristic neither of his college nor himself,–when the object of it started slowly and aimlessly down the street, leaving his overcoat on the bricks, where it had dropped.

The garment was a light, slender thing, and as Horace hung it over his arm and smoothed its soft lining with his fingers, he wondered more what its wearer was like, than what he should do with it. It was easy enough to keep the coat in his room until–as was sure to happen—an advertisement, somewhat vague as to where the article had been lost, appeared in the “Harvard Crimson,” or he might restore it at once to its owner, who by this time had stopped undecidedly in the black shadow on the nearest street-corner. There was something companionable in the way the coat clung to his arm, that made him wish to keep it a little longer; but he ended by doing the simpler thing.

“Isn’t this your overcoat?” he said, walking up to the sharp line of shadow on the other side of which the shirt bosom and face of thedrunken student showed faintly. Hewitt broke the pause that followed by repeating his question.

“Oh, how good of you! I had half decided to go after it,” came from the darkness in an astonishingly clear, fresh voice, whose convincing mastery of the first letter of the alphabet left little doubt as to its possessor’s birthplace. Had not the words been said with a formality that, under the circumstances, was absurd, Hewitt would have felt that he misjudged the man’s condition.

“Don’t mind me, really, I’m very, very tight.” It was impossible to misconstrue this statement, or the wild, exultant over-emphasis with which the final word was declaimed. Hewitt laughed.

“Oh, are you?” he answered, adding, “well, here’s your overcoat,” as if these two facts existed only in conjunction.

The man in the shadow veered suddenly from the wall he had been leaning against into the light; and Horace–seeing him distinctly for the first time–realised that it was his classmate, Bradley. Coming immediately after the talk with Curtiss, this meeting was startling to Horace. It seemed almost prearranged. He gently forced Bradley to take the overcoat, said good-night, and turned to walk away.

“Don’t go to bed! Oh, don’t go to bed!” pleaded Bradley, in a sort of engaging whimper. His clutch at Hewitt’s shoulder might have been either a gesture of entreaty or a measure of safety. “It’s early—awf’ly early. The longer you stay up in Cambridge the earlier it gets; and the sparrows walk all over Mount Auburn Street in the morning and sing,–corking big ones, like ostriches,–seen them lots of times. Don’t go to bed!”

“I’m afraid I must,” said Horace, looking gravely into his classmate’s large, kindly eyes, that swam helplessly, and focussed nothing. Bradley took possession of Hewitt’s other shoulder; then, in the intimate confidential tone that for so long had ceased to exist for Horace, he said, “I don’t want to go to bed–come on!”

The invitation, though as to form rather indefinite, was most sincere. There was distinctly some sort of an intention in Bradley’s wish to have the other man “Come on;” he spoke as if he already had expressed it. Hewitt, scanning his drawn face, and then lowering his glance to the snowy shirt-bosom, tried hard to find out, without asking, exactly where “on” was. Of course, any proposition from the fellow just then might be, in a general way, safely interpreted, “More drinks;” instinct told Horace that. But beyond this broad point of departure, along what lines did the amiable tipsy young person intend to proceed? He was becoming every moment more demonstrative, more insistent, and by reason of his condition, rather than in spite of it, more irresistible. Was he going back to town? Did he have some stuff in his own room? Or had he, perhaps, reached the stage that plans nothing more elaborate than the primitive, genial pastime of lurching, arm in arm, along the streets and making a noise? Bradley suddenly answered the unput questions by suggesting ways and means.

“We can wait until somebody comes out in a cab, and go back in it; done it lots of times.” He gave Hewitt a little urging shake. “Why, you’ve just come from town about a minute ago!” Horace’s attempt to back gently from under his friend’s nervous hands was a failure. Bradley gave him the long, wise look of one whose mind is blank, until a slow sort of inspiration enabled him to exclaim,–

“Well, you can’t stay in there all alone, can you? “–a very telling bit of argument. “I came out here to get you; that’s why I came out.”

Hewitt burst into honest laughter. This tall child struck him as indescribably funny and young and drunk. Then, with a quick downward wriggle, he broke away, still laughing, and made a dash for the steps. Hatless, wild-eyed Bradley, screaming curses into the night, had him round the knees, as he stumbled across the top step to the door. Together they rolled and slid, scuffling, gasping, to the brick sidewalk.

“You would try to get away from me, would you? What a hell of a dirty

trick to play a man! You would, would you?”

“Get off my stomach, Bradley, you hurt me.”

“You would break away, would you?” The robust emphasis of the remark pounded a painful staccato grunt out of Hewitt’s vitals.

“Please let me up!” It took a good deal of self-control to put it just that way; Hewitt had bumped his head, and was beginning to feel the coolbricks against his back.

“Oh, I don’t know,” mused Bradley, airily; “‘you’re not the only pebble on the beach.’” Then, after a silence, in which the man under him tried to rest his head more comfortably, “Will you be good? Do you know—I don’t think I can trust you! If I let you up, will you do what I want you to?”

“We’ll talk it over,” the other conceded.

They scrambled to their feet; Hewitt brushed himself off with his cap. Had both men been sober, they would have looked at each other a moment, and laughed. Under the circumstances, the situation was grotesque enough to seem quite natural to Bradley.

“Come on,” he said; “now we’ll go to town. Oh, my hat! where’s my hat–and my coat!” He cursed, as he looked about him,–an amiable, ingenuous ripple of blasphemy, as harmless in intention and as cheerfully spoken as a bit of verse.

A returning cab swung round the corner. Bradley sauntered into the middle of the street to stop it. The manner in which all idea of hat and coat passed from his mind made Hewitt think of a round-eyed baby absently letting drop the toy that has been thrust into its convulsive little fist. To Horace the cab was an unwelcome intrusion. He thought it foretold complications, and perhaps a scene. For he had decided, beyond the probability of changing his mind, that he would not spend the rest of the night in Boston with his exhilarated classmate. A nicer reticence than the simple one of moral scruples kept him from carousing with his new acquaintance. He shrank from taking advantage of this chance—so accidental, so far-fetched–of impressing himself on the one fellow in his class whose friendship, more than any other, he coveted. The proceeding, he felt, would be a somewhat thick-skinned one. There was something in the idea, not quite like winning a drunken man’s money at cards, but suggestive of it. “Peter” Bradley symbolised to Hewitt an entire chapter of Harvard life. To-night, Horace felt, in coming so unexpectedly on one with whom he existed in all the intimacy of the imagination, as if he had been caught surreptitiously reading the chapter in manuscript. He went out where Bradley was talking earnestly to the cab-driver.

“Let’s not go to town, Bradley,” he said, yawning. “It’s so far and chilly and everything.” Quickly, as if inspired by a new and daring thought, he grasped the boy by the wrist, and exclaimed enthusiastically, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do–we’ll stay in Cambridge!”

“By Heaven, I’ll go you! Eh-h-h-h-h-h–we’ll stay in Cambridge! We’ll stay in Cambridge!” He danced all over the street in a frenzy of mirth and movement, singing again and again, “We’ll _stay_ in Cambridge! We’ll _stay_ in Cambridge! we’ll _stay_ in Cambridge!” while Hewitt said, “Good-night–sorry he troubled you,” to the cabman. A voice from one of the small wooden houses that basks in the shadow of Claverly, yelled, “Oh, shut tup!” very peevishly, just as Bradley threw himself at Horace with a prolonged meaningless scream.

“What do you think you’d like to do now?” asked Hewitt, after a moment, bracing himself to support his burden.

“Wait till I get my breath, and we’ll do–everything,” panted the burden. It laughed hysterical, extremely silly little laughs. Then solemnly, soberly, Bradley led the way to the curbstone. “Come over here–I want to talk to you; sit down,” he said. “Will you wait here and not let a sparrow get by–not a single one–while I dash across and find something to drink?”

“It’s getting cold, Bradley; how long will you be?”

“You won’t know I’ve been gone, I’ll be so quick.” He was off,–half way across the street like a skittish young animal,–then tip-toeing back, stealthy, furtive, mysterious. He crouched by the man on the curbstone, and with his mouth close to Hewitt’s ear whispered earnestly:–

“If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell? It’s a secret, you know.”

“I don’t think you’d better,” gravely.

“I must,–it’s killing me.”

Horace looked to see if the fellow was crying.

“I’ll never repeat it to any one,” he promised.

“It’s awful,–horrible,” moaned Bradley, drawing closer to Hewitt, and putting his arms round him. “It’s this,” he sobbed; “I don’t believe in either Space or Time.” He was gone again, with a backward spring that sent the other sprawling. Horace sat up and watched the boy dart across to an opposite house, fumble a moment at the door, and disappear with a slam. Instantly every window upstairs and down glowed yellow. The noise of a piano, slapped pettishly from bass to treble by an open palm, came over to the young man who sat thinking on the curbstone.

What he thought was just about what any other normal person, under the same circumstances, would have thought. He wondered how long it would be before Peter came back; what they would do when he did come back; and where that night was leading. It might take him, Horace, far,–almost anywhere,–away from himself, to a troop of friends, to the club across the street. Or it might leave him at night’s ordinary destination. But whatever the end, the beginning was his opening, his chance. It had pranced at him in the guise of a crazy, faunlike, drunken thing; thanks to Curtiss, he had recognised it.

He tried to picture to himself the inside of the club house, over whose charmed threshold his friend had just plunged. He also marvelled a moment at the vagaries of inebriety; it was curious, for instance, that any one so far gone–so driven by every whimsical, erratic impulse as Bradley–should give heed to the etiquette that did not permit him to take into the club a man who had no club of his own. How artful the youth must have thought himself, when he left Horace behind, ostensibly to detain any large imaginary sparrows that might pass that way. Hewitt had begun to hope that the drink Bradley brought back might be beer, when the windows opposite blackened, the door slammed, and the boy came toward him once more. His expedition had not been in vain; in one hand he carried a pompous looking bottle, in the other some glasses that clinked cheerfully as he walked. From under one of his arms a second bottle aimed at Hewitt like a small piece of artillery.

“Unload me. That one’s burgundy; look out, don’t spill it, I pulled the cork. The other’s fizz. These are glasses. Got a knife?–cut the wires.” Bradley sat down on the curbstone.

“This looks as if we were going to see the sunrise,” said Hewitt, opening his penknife.

“I’d rather wait till hell freezes over; seen the other thing lots of times.” He filled a long glass more than half full of burgundy, and guzzled it. “Ugh–what belly wash–hot as tea.”

“That’s what you get for looking on the wine when it’s red. Here—try this.” Hewitt handed the other glass. It foamed at the edges.

“I could die drinking this stuff,” said Bradley, fervently.

“You probably will–here, give me some.” Horace with difficulty got possession of the glass, and held it to his lips. Bradley amused himself by wiping his wet hands in his friend’s hair.

They sat there until Peter had managed to drink and spill the contents of both bottles. He refused to tell where his room was, so Hewitt attempted to take him to Claverly. The task called for an infinite amount of patience and tact as well as time. For Peter’s manner, though all at once excessively polite, was firm.

“It’s ever so good of you to take all this trouble for me,” he asserted, in worried tones. Then he would lie down in the street, saying he was a dead horse, and refuse to get up. The affair became almost annoying when, on reaching the inside of Claverly by a great number of almost imperceptible advances, Bradley tore the fire apparatus from its red cage on the wall in one of the long corridors, and screamed “Fire!” like a maniac. If anything in the situation admitted of being called fortunate, it was the proximity of Horace’s room at that particular moment.

The proctors in Claverly are supposed to sleep in the attitude of one whose ears are tense with listening. And it has been said that during the hours in which convention prescribes pyjamas, their costume is of blanket wrappers and felt slippers. Their appearance upon a “scene of disturbance” has been estimated, variously, as simultaneous with the disturbance, or anywhere from one to ten seconds after it. Horace had just time enough to thrust Peter into his room, lock the door, and begin to gather up the hose, when Mr. Tush–arriving silently from nowhere–was there. The dishevelled Mr. Tush was absurd or sublime, according to the mood of the one who apperceived him. To the dispassionate onlooker, he merely gave an impression of hair and responsibility.

“The janitor will arrange the fire apparatus, Mr. Hewitt,” he said, drily. “By the way, would you mind explaining why it happens to be on the floor?”

Hewitt did explain. He was very sorry; a friend of his had come out from town; the friend was not quite himself; he was noisy and unmanageable;it would not happen again.

“There has been a great deal of disturbance in the building recently, Mr. Hewitt.”

Horace could think of no answer in which impertinence did not lurk.

“Where is your friend?”

“In my room.”

“Is he a student in Harvard University?”

“No.”

“Good-night, Mr. Hewitt.”

“Good-night, Mr. Tush.”

Afterward, whenever Hewitt thought over his meeting with Peter Bradley, the monosyllable loomed up big and disconcerting. What preceded and followed it were nothing. He had not minded Bradley’s drunken tyranny; the experience was novel. He had not objected to undressing the boy and putting him to bed; it was inevitable. But the lie meant something, and the memory of it hurt; although he believed it to be the simplest, most effective way of disposing of Tush.

Hewitt spent what was left of the night on his divan, and got up in time for a nine o’clock. He would have much rather slept until noon; but he did not want to be in his room when Bradley woke; he felt it might be rather trying for Bradley. So he hung clean towels over the edge of the bathtub, and pinned a note to the back of the chair on which he had laid his guest’s clothes, saying: “Sorry I have to run away. Hope you’ll find everything you want.” It was after eleven o’clock when he came back; but the fellow was still sleeping. Horace stood in the doorway a moment and watched the flushed, childish face on the pillow; it seemed incredible that Peter should be curled up there in bed. Then he tiptoed away and had luncheon at a hotel in town, and spent the afternoon looking at shop-windows.

Three days afterwards, while Hewitt was waiting in his room for Curtiss, who was coming round for a walk, Bradley came to see him. It was probably not a very easy thing to do; but Bradley did it adequately. His manner–sober–was the kind that a stranger attributes to shyness, an intimate friend to simplicity.

“I wasn’t nice at all the other night, was I?” he said, after a moment of awkwardness, during which they both laughed. “I’m awfully sorry about it really; it must have bored you like anything.”

“It didn’t at all,” declared Horace. He held out a package of cigarettes.

“Well, tell me what happened; I think I must have been a great deal tighter than you thought I was.”

“No, I don’t think that–” began Hewitt, at which they laughed some more. “Why, nothing very much happened; you merely–do you remember getting the champagne and burgundy?”

“Oh, perfectly.”

“Well, do you remember lying down in the street and refusing to get up?”

“No-o-o–” very doubtfully. (After all, I suppose one doesn’t remember such things.)

“Well, you did, and I had a time getting you here; and don’t you remember anything at all about the hose and the proctor and—”

So it was lived over again from beginning to end, with a great deal of detail and laughing and remorse of a cheerful and unconvincing kind. Bradley looked serious when he heard the part about the proctor; but on learning that Mr. Tush had not seen him, and that Hewitt’s lie had made the chance of a more careful inquiry quite improbable, he found the whole thing immensely amusing.

“I have a lot to thank you for,” he said, staring about the room. Hewitt made the inevitable protest, and then there was a pause. These two persons, who were Harvard men, classmates, and about the same age, suddenly had nothing to talk about. The single point at which their lives touched was the tiniest dot on the page of their experience,–the sort of dot, too, that both were willing to ignore as quickly as possible. They no doubt listened to the same lectures from time to time.

But one does not, apropos of nothing at all, discuss the Malthusian Doctrine or the importance of the semicolon in literature. You can’t talk to a college man about himself, when his career is a pleasanter one than your own, because–well, because you mustn’t. And you can’t talk to a man who is to you an unknown quantity,–a nonentity, a cipher,–simply because you can’t. It’s all very distressing, and you talk about athletics. But in the month of March the effort is transparent and a bore. Neither football nor base-ball is contemporaneous; the crew is still rather vague; and when you plunge recklessly into track athletics, it occurs to you, all at once, that you haven’t taken the trouble to go near any since your freshman year. It’s impossible, therefore, to recall whether Spavins is the person who ran the hurdles in sixteen, or reached incredible heights in the pole vault; it is even likely that Spavins did neither, and was all the time behind the bleachers absorbed in putting the shot. To tell the truth, you don’t know Spavins; you have never met him; you never will, and you always skip the column in the “Crimson” that records his exploits.

This was the basis on which Hewitt and Bradley finished their talk. The peculiar occasion of their being in the same room together was at an end. Bradley lingered merely because an innate sense of proportion kept him there; to leave the minute you say the only thing you came to say, is like running out of church before the people all round you are done confiding things to the backs of the pews in front of them. Your devotions only properly cease when the subdued spontaneous exertion of stout women regaining the perpendicular gives you the signal. Bradley was waiting for the signal. The bell on Harvard Hall, calling students to the last lecture of the day, sounded it.

“There goes the bell; I must hurry along,” he said, fingering the note-book he had brought with him.

“Oh, cut your lecture!” came from Horace rather eagerly. Bradley looked up in surprise. His face was not well fashioned for concealing what went on in his head. Just now it distinctly said, “How extraordinary! Why should I cut my lecture?” His words, however, were, “Oh, no, thank you; I must run along!” He took another cigarette to smoke on the way over to the Yard, and sauntered round the room, although he mentioned more than once his fear of being late. At the door, he turned to say, “Well, good-bye; I hope you know how much obliged I am to you for all that.”

“There isn’t anything really. Good-bye.” Horace assisted at the opening and shutting of the door, in the unnecessary way one does with strangers. Then he walked slowly up and down his study, with his hands in his pockets, whistling energetically under his breath, and stopping every now and then to stare out of the window. Curtiss came in almost immediately.

“I met that good-looking classmate of yours, Bradley, at the door,” he said. Curtiss walked straight up to Hewitt,–he had a dramatic way of doing almost everything,–and grasped his friend’s hand. “Has he been here?” he asked, smiling a pleased smile.

“Yes; he’s just left.”

A pause.

“Did he ask you to go see him?”

“No,” very simply.

“Will he come back?”

“No.”

“The pig!”

“I beg your pardon, he’s nothing of the kind.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, then.”

“Oh, yes, you do, better than anybody, except possibly myself.”

Another silence.

“Well, go on; I’m waiting.”

“Why should the man ask me to go see him?” asked Hewitt, passionately.

“He—”

“But, my dear boy!” protested Curtiss.

“Don’t! don’t!” Horace drew away pettishly. “When you bluff like that, you make me sick. Bradley has done everything he ought to have done, and more too,” he went on quietly. “If I expect more, I’m a fool; if you do, you’re a hypocrite! Bradley might have written me a polite note, and considered the thing square. Instead of that he took the trouble to climb up here to apologise and thank me. He was well-bred and polite and unget-at-able,–the way gentlemen ought to be. And that’s all; that’s the end of it. We’ll never see each other again; why should we? I suppose if I’d gone to any other college in the country, and this had happened, Bradley would have put his paws on my shoulders and lapped my face; and we’d have roomed together next year, and proposed to each other’s sisters on Class Day. But I didn’t go to any other college; I’m damned glad I didn’t,–everybody always is. I don’t know why, but I am. Between you and Bradley, I’ve learned more about this place than I ever knew there was to know. If I could write, I’d knock the spots out of any magazine article on Harvard that’s ever been printed.” Horace stopped and looked out of the window. What he had been saying was a curious mixture of bitterness and indifference.

“Come, let’s take a walk,” he exclaimed briskly, in another tone.

“Yes, let’s,” answered Curtiss; “that’s what I came for,” and he began to hum, while Horace was looking for a hat,–

“Oh, Harvard was old Harvard
When…. ”

These jokes are from “The Laughable Stories” by Mar Gregory John abu Faraj Bar Hebraeus (1226 – 1286) a bishop in the Syrian Church. Bar Hebraeus, as he is usually called, was a versatile and prolific writer whose best-known work is a history of the Mongols in the Middle East. This book was intended to be both edifying and amusing and has been very badly (though probably accurately) translated by one E. A. Wallis Budge. Budge’s English is virtually unreadable, and he translated the dirty jokes into Latin. If you want to translate them email emerson j at g mail dot com.

Buy “The Laughable Stories”
Budge’s translation online


XXVI. Dixit philosophus alius quidam, “Quatuor sunt genera corporalium voluptatum: quorum primum momento temporis durat ut coitu frueris; alterum per diem ut masculinâ prole gaudes usque dum nimium flere coepit; tertium per mensem ut novâ nuptâ usque dum ventrem fert; quartum tamen omnem per aevum ut divitiarum abundantiâ.”

XXXVII. Alius quidam in foro Venerem palam exercebat: qui interrogatus, “Nonne tui pudet? Quid facis?” Respondit, “Cur mei pudere decet: virum enim condo, si adolescere valet.

CCCXXXVI. Medicus olim quidam roganti, “Cathartica sumenti cur corpus sollicitatur?” respondit, “Quia et in conclavi verrendo crescit pulvis.”

CCCXXXVII. When a certain physician went to visit a prince who was grievously sick, he felt his windpipe and looked at his urine, but could find in him no sign of bodily disease. Then he began to introduce love stories, and he saw that the beat of his pulse was changed, and he straightway enquired if he had been in the habit of holding converse with the servants out of doors. And the servants said to him, “He hath never been in the habit of going out.” Then the physician said, “Let all the handmaidens come forth and pass before him,” and they went by one by one, and straightway when a certain handmaiden drew nigh to him a mighty change took place in his pulse and breathing. Thus the physician was confirmed in his opinion, and he told the king his story and the handmaiden was given to him, and he was healed of his sickness.

CCCLIV. Dixit quidam scurrae urbano, “Matris meae gula assidue aliquid colligit: flagratque et constricta est.” Respondit autem scurra, “Si venter uxoris tuae ad matris gulam similitudine accederet, multum proficeres.”

CCCCVII. Dixit alius quidam somniorum interpreti, “Dormienti mihi duo panes in manibus visi sunt quorum de utroque sumebam.” Responsum est “Tu quidem cum duabus unâ matre natis coire soles.”

CCCCVIII. Dixit mercator quidam somniorum interpreti, “Dormienti mihi canis rufus commensalis epulari visus est.” Responsum est, “Scythicum servum habes qui uxori tuae haud secus quam tu, inire solet.” Quod, rem percontatus, verum esse intellexit.

CCCCIX. Dixit alius quidam somniorum interpreti, “Dormiens favum edere ad focum visus sum et postea mel quod e favo effluxerat.” Cui responsum est, “Deorum igitur iram pertimesce et coire desine cum istâ quae te lactavit.”

CCCCXI. Dixit alius quidam somniorum interpreti, “Dormienti mihi vestes sanguine perfundi visi sunt quem cum in puteal expresseram, iterum perfundebantur.” Cui responsum est, “Nefasto cum quadam coitu diu fruitus es at nondum tui poenituit.

CCCCXXXVII. Avarus alius quidam aegrotans oleum, medicis jubentibus, hausit: ubi alvum autem pergâsset, servis, “Ite,” clamat, “oleum e stercore meo colligite quo ad lucernas incendendo uti possimus.”

DXX. Mimus alius interrogatus quot eduxisset liberos, regessit, “Deos obtestor uxorem meam saepius peperisse quam cum illâ concubuerim.”

DXXXVII. Stultus alius quidam qui cum matre suâ pisces conditos edebat, “Epulare” ait, “mî mater: Cibum enim habemus ad coeundum praestantissimum.”

DXLV. Stultus alius quidam quum cum virgine quam duxerat concubuisset virginis patrem mane salutatum ivit dixitque, “Filia tua me noctu sanguine perfudit—quod credo te fraude finxisse ne quid de istius castitate dubitarem.

DLXIII. Stultus alius quidam interrogatus, “Cur nondum uxorem duxisti?” respondit, “Frater meus uxorem duxit quae, en! ambobus et illi et mihi sufficit.” Conclamabant omnes, “Vae misero tibi! quo modo una duum uxor fieri potest?” Respondit autem, “Abram respice qui pater erat gentium: quomodo evenit ut duas uxores duxisset, ipse tamen unus ambabus suffecit.”

DLXX. Stultus quidam qui catharticum sibi adhibuerat in aedificium dirutum se contulit ventrem evacuatum; cum autem subligacula solvere voluit, tunicae ligamina recinxit ut ubi consederat ventrem in chlamydem exonerare

DLXXIV. Stultus alius quidam interrogatus, “Quot annos natam filiam in matrimonium tradidisti? Nescio hercle respondit, hoc tamen scio me istam spopondisse verendis cum maxime istius lanugine tectis. Computate ergo quot annos natae verenda lanugo tegat.”

DLXXXI. Stulto cuidam meienti, stultus alius, “Quam ingentem penem habes!” ait, “quo modo, quaeso, istum portare vales?” Regisset alter, “I istud domi meae dictum: ibi enim assidue maledicor quia tam parvus sit.”

DCXXXV. Dixit alius quidam a daemone obsessus, “Proximâ nocte somnium mihi obvenit partim verum, partim falsum.” Quaestum est de eo, “Quid vis dicere?” et regessit, “Dormiens cum pulcherrimâ puellâ coire visus sum: experrectus autem intellexi me coiisse non tamen cum puellâ.

. Another demoniac was very skilful in interpreting dreams in his madness, and one day a certain nobleman said to him, “I saw in my dream as if a great number of sparrows were fastened up the skirts of my garments, and I made them to fly off one after the other, but when the last one came to escape I caught hold of it.” And the demoniac interpreted the dream thus:—”If thou didst in truth see what thou sayest thou must have made thy supper upon lentiles.—Cum autem dormitares pedere coepisti: ventrem postremus exonerare expetentem to ipsum cohibuisti.” Cui nobilis subridens, “Di te accusent! Mihi enim evenit quemadmodum narras.”

DCXLVI. Two lunatics were engaged in a severe fight with each other when the guards captured them and hauled them before the governor. The governor said to one of them, “Why didst thou strike this man?” and he replied, “Manu testes meas exporrectâ captabat ut prehensum alterutrum resecaret.” Judex ergo quaesivit, “Quare manu testes illius captabas?” Respondit, “Crede mihi tot habet uxores et pellices ut tale facinus patrare nunquam ausus essem.

After the death of Yesugei (the father of Temujin, who was eventually to become Genghis Khana), the young Temujin  and his mother and brothers were abandoned by everyone except a few loyal retainers. Yesugei had been a contender for Mongol leadership, and his Tayyichi’ut allies (or followers) intended to make their own claim for leadership. For them, Yesugei’s heirs could only be an impediment to their plans, and while custom did not allow them to kill Temujin while he was still a child, they planned to return and finish the job later when he had become a man.

As the story goes, this tiny family was able to survive only by the heroic efforts of their mother, Ho’elün. At that time Temujin had one full brother, Qasar, and two half brothers, Bekter and Belgutei. Bekter and Belgutei bullied Temujin and Qasar, and after Ho’elün had proved unwilling or unable to settle the dispute, Temujin and Qasar stalked and killed Bekter. Here is their mother Ho’elun’s reaction, as reported in the Secret History, #78:

When they returned to the yurt, the noble mother saw the looks on her two sons’ faces and understood what happened, and she said:

Killer!
He who burst from my hot womb clutching a clot of blood,
that one  —

like a Khazar dog snapping at its afterbirth
like a panther attacking a cliff
like a lion uncontrollable in rage
like a dragon engulfing its prey
like a falcon striking its shadow
like a pike swallowing in silence
like a camel nipping a foal’s heel
like a wolf stalking in a blizzard
like a duck eating its unruly chicks
like a gang of jackals guarding its den
like a tiger relentlessly seizing its prey
like a mad dog attacking blindly —

he has killed!

Just when “We have no other friend than our shadow, and no other whip than our horse’s tail”, and when, unable to endure our Tayyichi’ut brothers’ outrage, we ask ourselves who should take vengeance on them — you behave this way to one another, saying ‘I cannot live with you’. Thus she spoke, “Repeating the old sayings, reciting ancient words”, mightily reviling her sons.

This is only the most vivid of a number of passages showing Temujin ruthlessly destroying his own kin, and some have speculated that the compiler of the Secret History  belonged to an anti-Temujin faction of the Mongol nation.  However, I think that this story is ambiguous in meaning, and marks  an internal tension in the Secret History and within Mongol society itself.

Family solidarity is a major theme in the Secret History.  Early in the book we hear the legend of Mother Alan and her sons — complete with the nearly-universal metaphor the unbreakable bundle of arrows which can each be broken singly.  (Mother Ho’elün tells this story herself earlier in the passage I am citing.)  Family solidarity was indeed important in Mongol society, and most of the  the Mongol groups seen in this story are defined, at least in principle, primarily by kinship.

However, the Secret History is primarily the story of Temujin’s rise to power, and Temujin honored family solidarity only early during his rise, and not always even then. Bekter is only the first of his many victims — of the patrilineal kin contemporary with Temujin named in the Secret History, at least half die at his hand, on his orders, or fighting against him in battle. Furthermore, much the same is true of his main rival, the Kerait Ong Khan, a contender for leadership of all Mongols (and former patron of Temujin) who had  killed at least two of his brothers and also had come  into violent conflict with one of his uncles. (And yes, Temujin killed him too, thus becoming Genghis Khan.

Among the Mongols succession was decided by a special form of election called “tanistry”1. All the adult males of the tribe, without regard for seniority or closeness of relationship to the deceased, were eligible to succeed him. Candidates for leadership put forward their claims, and the other members of the tribe chose sides. In some cases a consensus could quickly be reached. More often there would be two or more contenders, and the supporters of the contenders would fight until one of then was victorious and the others were dead. Most of the followers of the loser (except his own closest kin) would simply be incorporated into the winner’s forces, though sometimes the losing faction fled to try to establish themselves elsewhere.  (Much the same would be done when a tribe was defeated by a different tribe: the tribal leadership would be killed, and the commoners, women, and children would be absorbed into the other tribe).

Temujin’s killing of Bekter was just the first in a series of tanistry fights by which he gained control of an increasingly large number of kin. By killing his brother Bekter, Temujin became the leader of his father Yesugei’s descendants and their dependents and subordinates.2.  Later he gained control of his grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s descendants by killing his uncle Daritai and a few cousins. In his further career kinship became nominal at best as he increased his horde by accepting the surrender of other tribes.  Chinggis Qan’s ulus was ultimately a rationally-organized political-military machine subject entirely to the Qan’s will, within which kinship groups were relatively unimportant and weak.

The Mongols really had two models of social order. One was the familiar kinship model of the segmentary or conical clan, and this one was explicitly expressed by Ho’elün in her lament (as well as in the legend of Mother Alan earlier in the book). The other, which overrode the first, was the strong military leader who brought unity to the Mongols by terrible means, welding them into a powerful unit which was able to plunder and dominate the neighboring sedentary, urbanized peoples. Genghis Khan’s career follows the second pattern.

From this point of view, in the context of the book as a whole Ho’elün’s lament can be given a different interpretation. Rather than simply condemning Temujin for killing his brother, she can be seen to be prophesying that her son, resembling as he does all the savage beasts she evokes, could never accept defeat or subordination and would become an irresistable force which would eventually dominate the world. This interpretation has the advantage of being consistent with the rest of the story, which glorifies Chinggis Qan, and also with the facts of history.

(Sometime later I will develop the idea that tanistry is only an extreme case of state-formation, one characteristic of nomadic societies without fortifications, real property, or permanent institutions,  within which the late ruler really has nothing concrete to hand down to his heir except the family charisma, so that the heir has to re-found the state by his own actions. Historically, the transition from clan organization to state organization is usually engineered by bloody tyrants who murdered their own kin — something which was recognized by Plutarch in his biographies of Aeneas and Romulus, and which was also at work in the Greek myth of Jupiter and Saturn and the Athenian stories about Drakon and Solon. According to this analysis, the problem with Macbeth was not that he was murderous, but that he was chicken.

Once tanistry is recognized as a sometimes-normal succession practice, many of the horrible family murders and bloody succession struggles in civilized history can be reclassified as a latent secondary forms, rather than as monstruous and unthinkable abominations.) Dracon Solon**

NOTES

1. See Joseph Fletcher, “The Mongols: Social and Ecological perspectives”, IX in Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia, Variorum, 1995

2. Bekter is aware of what’s happening. Just before he is killed he says “Just when we cannot put up with the outrage of our Tayichi’ut kinsmen and ask ourselves who will be able to take vengeance on them….how can you harbor such thoughts about me?” (Secret History #78, de Rachewiltz tr. p. 21.)   In other words, the half-brothers Bekter and Temujin had already been wondering which of them would be the leader of the inevitable attack against the Tayichi’ut. (Many of Bekter’s words are almost identical to those of “Ho’elün’s Lament”, and most likely were borrowed from that song by the compiler of the Secret History).

In the same speech Bekter, knowing that he will be killed, asks that his younger full-brother Belgutei be spared by his half-brothers: “Anyway, do not destroy my hearth, do not make away with Belgutei”. While Mongol kinship is theoretically patrilineal, Bekter’s speech shows that descent in the female line also had a significant formal role, and seemingly here Bekter defines his own kin (presumably for purposes of sacrifice and the afterlife) through his mother more than through his father.

 

Janus Vitalis’ “Qui Roman in media quaeris novus advena Roma“,
with eleven translations into five languages.

At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, a Frenchman was able to read
A poem on the ruins of Rome signed by Joachim du Bellay; a Pole knew the same poem as the work of Mikołaj Sęp-Szarzyński; a Spaniard, as the work of Francisco Quevedo; while the true author, whom the others adapted without scruple, was a little-known Latin humanist, Ianus [Janus] Vitalis of Palermo.

P. 10 in “Starting from my Europe”, by Czeslaw Milosz (in The Witness of Poetry, Harvard, 1983, Norton Lectures, pp 1-21.)

Janus Vitalis’ “Qui Roman in media quaeris novus advena Roma” is the rare case of the completely-translatable poem, probably because it is an epigram which relies on paraphrasable meaning, and I find Cohen’s prose closing line as effective as anyone’s: “Oh Rome, in your greatness and her beauty, what was firm has fled, and only the transitory remains and lasts.” It can be seen that the translators allowed themselves quite a bit of freedom in the way they set up the clinching lines — for example, they address the poem variously to “the stranger”, “the pilgrim”, “the traveller”, and “the newcomer”.

The import of this poem is really rather uncertain. It’s a meditation on the transience of glory, but Rome in its imperial phase lasted for well over five centuries, and Rome cast such a shadow on later centuries that states were  claiming to be Rome at least as late as 1806, when Napoleon abolished the  Holy Roman Empire. So I’m afraid that those of us who are uneasy about the threat of empire can really take little comfort from this poem, except in the knowledge that at least, as events are taking place all around us, we still can sit here, for now, reading our books and thinking about the past, the future, and the changes.

Janus Vitalis Panormitanus
(Giani or Giovanni Vitali of Palermo)

De Roma
Qui Romam in media quaeris novus advena Roma,
   Et Romae in Roma nil reperis media,
Aspice murorum moles, praeruptaque saxa,
   Obrutaque horrenti vasta theatra situ:
Haec sunt Roma.  Viden velut ipsa cadavera, tantae
   Urbis adhuc spirent imperiosa minas.
Vicit ut haec mundum, nixa est se vincere; vicit,
   A se non victum ne quid in orbe foret.
Nunc victa in Roma Roma illa invicta sepulta est,
Atque eadem victrix victaque Roma fuit.
Albula Romani restat nunc nominis index,
Quinetiam rapidis fertur in aequor aquis.
Disce hinc, quid possit fortuna; immota labascunt,
Et quae perpetuo sunt agitata manent.

Text from Renaissance Latin Poetry,
compiled and edited by I. D. McFarlane.
Manchester University Press/Barnes and Noble:
New York, 1980; originally found in
Theodori Bezae Vezelii poematum editio secunda
[Geneva] 1569. 2nd part, p. 191-2.
Thanks to Otto Steinmayer of Sarawak,
who found the text for me.

Mikołaj Sęp-Szarzyński Ty, co Rzym wpośród Rzyma chcąc baczyć, pielgrzymie, A wżdy baczyć nie możesz w samym Rzyma Rzymie, Patrzaj na okrąg murów i w rum obrócone Teatra i kościoły, i słupy stłuczone: To są Rzym. Widzisz, jako miasta tak możnego I trup szczęścia poważność wypuszcza pierwszego. To miasto, świat zwalczywszy, i siebie zwalczyło, By nic niezwalczonego od niego nie było. Dziś w Rzymie zwyciężonym Rzym niezwyciężony (To jest ciało w swym cieniu) leży pogrzebiony. Wszytko się w nim zmieniło, sam trwa prócz odmiany Tyber, z piaskiem do morza co bieży zmieszany. Patrz, co Fortuna broi: to się popsowało, Co było nieruchome; trwa, co się ruchało. http://www.staropolska.gimnazjum.com.pl/ barok/Sep_Szarzynski/drobiazgi_06.html Unknown translator (from Sęp-Szarzyński) If midst Rome you wish to see Rome, pilgrim, Tho in Rome naught of Rome might you see, Behold the walls’ ring, the theatres, temples And ruptured pillars, to rubble all turned, Rome be these! Mark how the corpse of a city So strong still past fortune’s pomp exudes; Subduing a world, herself the city subdued Lest yet more to subdue might there be. Today in broken Rome, Rome unbroken (A substance in its shadow) lies entombed. Within all’s changed; alone past change Tiber remains, that to sea runs mixed with sand. See what Fortune plays: ’tis wasted away, What was unmoving; what moved, yet remains. http://oldpoetry.com/poetry/26252   Leonid Tsyv’yan (Цывьян) (from Sęp-Szarzyński) МИКОЛАЙ СЭМП ШАЖИНСКИЙ (ок.1550-1581) ЭПИТАФИЯ РИМУ Ты в Риме хочешь Рим увидеть, пилигрим, Но тщетно смотришь ты: средь Рима Рим незрим. Обломки статуй и остатки стен старинных, Театры, портики, лежащие в руинах, – Се вечный град. Взгляни: погиб державный Рим, Но полон труп его величием былым. Рим, покоривший свет, себя поверг и свету Тем показал: пред ним неодолимых нету, И, побежден собой – непобедимый – он Своей гробницей стал: Рим в Риме погребен. Переменилось всё, и лишь без измененья, С песком мешаясь, Тибр стремит свое теченье. Вот каверза Судьбы: лежит во прахе тот, Кто слыл незыблемым, а зыбкое живет. Here is something with reference to Brodsky and to this poem: “Открытка из города К.”, по Венцлове, – сонет, в котором Кенигсберг “играет роль Рима”, а автор следует традиции “эпитафий Риму” (Ианус Виталис, Дю Белле, Спенсер, Кеведо, Семп-Шажиньский), где “разрушенные строения “вечного города” противопоставлены водам Тибра: парадокс, имеющий и теологическое измерение” (“сохраняется текучеее и ненадежное, а бренным оказывается мощное, сверхматериальное”). Таким образом, кенигсбергские стихи – подходы к римской теме у Бродского… http://www.ruthenia.ru/hyperboreos/news/20001028.htm “Postcard from the City of K.” — according to [Thomas] Venclova, a sonnet in which Konigsberg “plays the role of Rome” and the author follows the tradition of the “epitaph for Rome” (Janus Vitalis, Du Bellay, Spenser, Quevedo, Sęp-Szarzyński), where “the ruined buildings of the ‘eternal city’ are contrasted with the waters of the Tiber: a paradox having theological dimensions as well” (“the flowing and unreliable is preserved, the mighty and supersubstantial is transitory”). Thus the Konigsberg verses are an approach to the Roman theme in Brodsky…” From a speech at the Brodsky readings, which Sluzhevskay reports as Oct 28, 2000. Here’s the Brodsky poem: Иосиф Бродский ОТКРЫТКА ИЗ ГОРОДА К. Томасу Венцлова Развалины есть праздник кислорода и времени. Новейший Архимед прибавить мог бы к старому закону, что тело, помещенное в пространство, пространством вытесняется. Вода дробит в зерцале пасмурном руины Дворца Курфюрста; и, небось, теперь пророчествам реки он больше внемлет, чем в те самоуверенные дни, когда курфюрст его отгрохал. Кто-то среди развалин бродит, вороша листву запрошлогоднюю. То – ветер, как блудный сын, вернулся в отчий дом и сразу получил все письма 1967 Сочинения Иосифа Бродского. Пушкинский фонд. Санкт-Петербург, 1992. http://www.litera.ru:8080/stixiya/authors/brodskij/ razvaliny-est-prazdnik.html Thomas Heywood New Stranger to the City come, Who midst of Rome enquir’st for Rome, And midst of Rome canst nothing spye That looks like Rome, cast backe thine eye; Behold of walls the ruin’d mole, The broken stones not one left whole; Vast Theatres and Structures high, That levell with the ground now lye, These now are Rome, and of that Towne Th’Imperious Reliques still do frowne, And ev’n in their demolisht seat The Heav’ns above them seem to threat, As she the World did once subdue, Ev’n to her selfe she overthrew; Her hand in her owne bloud she embru’d, Lest she should leave ought unsubdu’d: Vanquisht in Rome, Invict Rome now Intombed lies, as forc’d to bow. The same Rome (of the World the head) In Vanquisher and Vanquished. The river Albula’s the same, And still preserves the Roman name; Which with a swift and speedy motion Is hourely hurry’d to the Ocean. Learne hence what Fortune can; what’s strong And seemeth fixt, endures not long: But more assurance may be layd On what is moving and unstayed. From Renaissance Latin Poetry, compiled and edited by I. D. McFarlane. Manchester University Press/Barnes and Noble: New York, 1980;  English translation originally from Thomas Heywood from: Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells,  London, 1637, p. 459.) J. V. Cunningham (probably from the Latin) You that a stranger in mid-Rome seek Rome and can find nothing in mid-Rome of Rome, Behold this mass of walls, these abrupt rocks, Where the vast theatre lies overwhelmed. Here, here is Rome! Look how the very corpse Of greatness still imperiously breathes threats! The world she conquered, strove herself to conquer, conquered that nothing be unconquered by her. Now conqueror Rome’s interred in conquered Rome, and the same Rome conquered and conqueror. Still Tiber stays, witness of Roman fame, Still Tiber flows on swift waves to the sea. Learn whence what Fortune can: the unmoved falls, And the ever-moving will remain forever. J. V. Cunningham,The poems of J. V. Cunningham, Ohio U. Press, 1997, pp. 118-9, 194-5. Joachim du Bellay Les Antiquités de Rome, #3 Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome Et rien de Rome en Rome n’aperçois, Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcs que tu vois, Et ces vieux murs, c’est ce que Rome on nomme. Vois quel orgueil, quelle ruine : et comme Celle qui mit le monde sous ses lois, Pour dompter tout, se dompta quelquefois, Et devint proie au temps, qui tout consomme. Rome de Rome est le seul monument, Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement. Le Tibre seul, qui vers la mer s’enfuit, Reste de Rome. ô mondaine inconstance ! Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps détruit, Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance. Edmund Spenser Ruins of Rome: By Bellay Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome here seekest, And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv’st at all, These same old walls, old arches, which thou seest, Old Palaces, is that which Rome men call. Behold what wreak, what ruin, and what waste, And how that she, which with her mighty power Tam’d all the world, hath tam’d herself at last, The prey of time, which all things doth devour. Rome now of Rome is th’ only funeral, And only Rome of Rome hath victory; Ne ought save Tyber hastening to his fall Remains of all: O world’s inconstancy. That which is firm doth flit and fall away, And that is flitting, doth abide and stay. This is only Part 3 of a longer poem consisting of 32 sonnets plus an envoi. Thanks to aldiboronti via Language Hat. Complete Spenser poem Ezra Pound from Personae(probably from Bellay) O thou new comer who seek’st Rome in Rome And find’st in Rome no thing thou canst call Roman Arches worn old and palaces made common, Rome’s name alone within these walls keeps home. Behold how pride and ruin can befall One who hath set the whole world ‘neath her laws, All-conquering, now conquered, because She is Time’s prey and Time consumeth all. Rome that art Rome’s one sole last monument, Rome that alone hast conquered Rome the town, Tiber alone, transient and seaward bent, Remains of Rome. O world, thou unconstant mime! That which stands firm in thee Time batters down, And that which fleeteth doth outrun swift time. Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas Buscas en Roma a Roma ¡oh peregrino! Y en Roma misma a Roma no la hallas: Cadáver con las que ostentó murallas, Y, tumba de sí proprio, el Aventino. Yace, donde reinaba, el Palatino; Y limadas del tiempo las medallas, Más se muestran destrozo a las batallas De las edades, que blasón latino. Soló el Tíber quedó cuya corriente Si ciudad la regó, ya sepoltura ¡Oh Roma!, en tu grandeza, en tu hermosura huyó lo que era firme, y solamente lo fugitivo permanece y dura. Robert Lowell The Ruins of Time II (after Quevedo) in Near the Ocean  You search in Rome for Rome? O Traveller! in Rome itself, there is no room for Rome, the Aventine is its own mound and tomb, only a corpse receives the worshipper. And where the Capitol once crowned the forum, are medals ruined by the hands of time; they show how more was lost to chance and time than Hannibal or Caesar could consume. The Tiber flows still, but its waste laments a city that has fallen in its grave – each wave’s a woman beating at her breast. O Rome! From all your palms, dominion, bronze and beauty, what was firm has fled. What once was fugitive maintains its permanence. J. M. Cohen The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse (from Quevedo) You look for Rome in Rome, oh traveler, and in Rome herself you do not find Rome’ the walls that she boasted of are a corpse, and the Aventine is its own tomb. The Palatine lies where it used to reign, and medals filed down by time seem more like the relics of ancient battles than the insignia of Rome. Only the Tiber has remained; and its current, which washed her as a city, now bewails her as a tomb with mournful sounds of woe. Oh Rome, in your greatness and your beauty, what was firm has fled, and only the transitory remains and lasts.   Alex Ingber To Rome buried in its ruins (from Quevedo) You search in Rome for Rome, oh wanderer!, and yet in Rome itself you don’t find Rome: the walls boasting its fame are now a corpse, the Aventine now serves as its own tomb. It lies now where the Palatine once reigned; and its medallions, worn away by time, show more the devastation of the battles of the ages than great Latium’s pride. Only the Tiber has remained, whose flow, if once a city watered, now, a grave, it mourns for her with brokenhearted tones. Oh Rome!, of all your greatness, your allure, that which was firm has fled, and nothing but what is elusive stays and will endure. http://sonnets.spanish.sbc.edu/Quevedo_Roma.html

Baldassarre Castiglione on the ruins of Rome

John Emerson
Chapters 07, 49, 60, 77, 79 and 81 of the Daodejing:
Text, translation, and commentary

It is generally accepted that the Daodejing is a composite, the work of many authors over a considerable period, and that its present rather chaotic sequence is the work of a series of editors. In my version I try to sort the Daodejing into intelligible groups based on my understanding of the text and its history, and the sequence of my translation is entirely different than the sequence of the familiar Wang Bi text.

I begin by dividing the Daodejing, on textual grounds, into two approximately equal parts: Sage Dao and Early Dao. Sage Dao is made up of chapters 67-81, all other chapters in which the Sage is mentioned, and six chapters (Chapters 08, 09, 36, 53, 62, and 65) chosen because of their thematic relationship to the rest of Sage Dao. Early Dao is just the remainder of the Daodejing and I have assumed it is earlier. This rather mechanical procedure produces two parts which are clearly different in content: Sage Dao speaks especially of governmental affairs, while Early Dao includes most of the Daodejing’s mystical, metaphysical, and poetic chapters.

Besides dividing the Daodejing into its two major parts, I have divided each of these parts into 7 topical subgroups and have edited each chapter based on a comparison of the Wang Bi text with four much earlier texts unearthed by archaeologists during the last fifty years or so. These topical subgroups (some of which might also be textual subgroups) are internally fairly consistent and make it possible to find a unity in the Daodejing which is based not on sameness, but on the relationships between parts which are quite different from one another.

My commentary emphasizes the Daodejing’s internal relationships (with crossreferences), its textual history, and its relationships to the works of other thinkers of that era. In general my translation, text, and commentary are more speculative than is the norm.

Group VII
Sages
(Chapters 07, 49, 60, 77 79, 81)

This section is the culmination of Sage Dao and of the Daodejing as a whole. These chapters were some of the last written: none of them are included in the Guodian text, and 3 of the 5 final chapters of the present Daodejing belong to this group. Every chapter mentions the Sage, and this group includes 3 of the 5 chapters in which the Sage stands alone as the topic of the chapter rather than as part of a 是以聖人 introductory formula (Chapters 49, 60, and 81, the others instances are in chapters 05a and 28b).

Three of these chapters speak of 天道 / 天之道 the Dao of Heaven, and two of them speak of 天地 Heaven and Earth. Perkins has suggested that the prominence of Heaven in chapters 67-81 (the consecutive group of 15 chapters not included in the early Guodian text) might be a sign of the influence of Mohism, and while I suspect that this emphasis on Heaven might be a development of the ideas of Shen Dao rather than of Mohism, the emphasis in these five chapters on the Sages’ 無私 selflessness and 無親 impartiality might likewise be a development of Mohist 兼愛 universal love / impartial concern.

None of these chapters include the kind of practical political and military advice seen in most of the rest of Sage Dao, and the selflessness in these chapters would fit well into Early Dao. (In fact, the aphorism at beginning of chapter 07 fits well with aphorisms central to chapters 04, 05, and 06 and may originally have belonged together with them). Sages have no personal interest (無私, 07; 恆無心, 49) and favor no clan or party (無親,79). They do not strive or compete (為而不爭, 81) and do not take credit, claim ownership, collect debts or avenge grievances (是以聖人為而弗志也, 成而弗居, GD 02; 是以聖人執左契 而不以責於人, 79). Standing outside the affiliations and competitions by which normal people define themselves, Sages are obscure (不肖, 67) and do not want to be distinguished (不欲見賢, 77).

With no personal interest, they identify with others (聖人恆無心, 以百姓之心為心, 49) and consider others’ gains their gain (既以與人, 己愈多, 81). They follow the Way of Heaven and soften inequalities (天之道損有餘而補不足, 77), calm disturbances (非其鬼不神也, 其神不傷人也, 60), and help but never harm (聖人亦不傷人, 60; 利而不害, 81).

It is just because Sages are detached (無私, 07; 無親, 79), not needy or desirous (無欲, 57), and undistinguished that they can be great (夫唯不肖,故能大 67). Normal people are always at the intersection of multiple polarities and hierarchies – debtor and creditor, high and low, great and small, strong and weak, husband and wife, master and slave, Clan A and Clan B — and from these polarities and hierarchies (along with ambition and need) conflict and harm often arise.

Like Dao, Sages are everything and nothing and undefinable, and for this reason they cannot be distinguished or widely known (賢). They have few needs or desires and seek no benefit, and so do not do the harm that needy people inevitably do. Their capacity for promiscuous benevolence is like the inexhaustible fertility of the forces of life and of Dao, and their effectual benevolence is the ultimate form of Virtue 德 (the capacity for benefiting others). They quietly do what they do and then withdraw, allowing others to take the credit. They can be compared to a catalyst, which enables chemical reactions but is unchanged by them.

Chapter Seven
*07

天長地久 天地之所以能 長且久者 以其不自生也 故能長生 是以聖人後其身而身先 外其身而身存 非以其無私輿？ 故能成其私

Heaven is long-lasting and Earth is enduring. Heaven and Earth can last long and endure because they do not live for themselves. Therefore they are long lived. So Sages hold back but end up first, put themselves outside yet remain. Isn’t the because they have no self? Thus they can fulfill themselves.

長久 44 59
長02 06 09 10 22 24 28 44 51 54 59 67
久 15 16 23 33 44 58 59 67

Sages have no private interest and no ego. Here the Daodejing rejects 私 egoism, selfishness and self-assertion much as the Confucians did, favoring sharing and giving over getting and keeping. The egoism rejected by the Daodejing, however, is especially the competitive public egoism of those who strive for wealth, power, and fame and includes the Mohist and Confucian efforts to attain high position. The egoism of ambition puts you at risk of death (either death in battle or death as the result of court intrigue) and it requires you either to gain the support of others or to defeat them, in these senses making you dependent and not free.

The preservation and cultivation of life 生 and of the body 身 (a different form of “selfishness”) is harmed and not helped by competition for visible rewards and public esteem, and because followers of Dao have withdrawn from that competition and are not trying to accumulate wealth or power, they do not endanger themselves and are also able to be helpful to others. Chapter 49 makes the same point, with more emphasis on the Sage’s involvement with others.

長 / 久: The Daodejing here and elsewhere accepts the traditional high value Chinese gave to permanence and age. What abides is the most real.

Speculation: perhaps it is only an odd coincidence, but at the time when the Daodejing was written the word 私 si “self” was pronounced almost the same as the word 死 siʔ “death”, and it could also refer to what we call “the private parts” and their shameful functions. “Body” lhin 身 and “spirit” 神 m-lin were likewise pronounced similarly in in Old Chinese (and identically today: shēn.)

The words 尸 / 屍 lhi “corpse” and 屎 lhiʔ “feces” are not close cognates to 私 si / 死 siʔ, but they are in the same rhyme-group, and perhaps the selfish 私 siʔ is the body in its negative sense as shameful, polluting or no longer alive (尸, 屍 / lhi, 屎 lhiʔ) in contrast to the 身 lhin honored in chapter 13, the body of life 生.

Chapter Forty-Nine
*49

聖人恆無心 以百姓之心為心 善者善之 不善者亦善之 德善 信者信之 不信者吾亦信之 德信 聖人在天下也 歙歙焉 為天下渾心 百姓皆注其耳目焉 聖人皆咳之

Sages are always without a mind. They take the people’s mind as their own. The good they treat well, And the bad they also treat well. They gain goodness. To the true they are true, And to the false they are also true. They gain truthfulness. Sages in this world are all pulled in. For the sake of the world they muddle their minds. The eyes and ears of the people gravitate toward them but the Sages just smile.

百姓 05 17 49 75
注 49 62
信 08 17 21 23 38 49 63 76 81
渾 (混, 昏) 14 15 18 25 49 57 58. (Other variants: 昏,運,沌,湷,昆,綸)
孩 (晐咳䀭) 49 20

For 恆無心 “always is without a mind” the Wang Bi text has 無常心 “without a constant mind”, but the earlier texts always have the former version. “Without a mind” 無心 here is like chapter 07’s 無私 “without a self”: Sages do not have intentions, desires, or interests,, and they are inscrutable. The people try to read them and look for signs, but Sages just smile benignly. (Other texts read 聖人皆孩之 “Sages just treat them like children.”)

Confusion 渾 / 混 /昏 is usually a positive value in the Daodejing, either in the sense of a mystical openness to experience not restricted by desires and intentions, or an ideal state of society governed by custom adjusted to immediate circumstances, rather than by laws and prescriptions. However, in chapters 18 and 57 (邦家昏), 昏 means disorder and is to be avoided.

Sages are circumspect and work by indirection. The people just barely know they exist (大上下知有之, chapter 17). They do not claim credit for the good they do: “They get the job done and then withdraw” (功遂身退, chapter 09); “The job is done and the business is finished, and the people all say ‘We just naturally did this” (功成事遂百姓皆謂我自然, chapter 17). Like the Confucian Sage, the Sages of the Daodejing have a magnetic power, and without their doing anything, the example of their virtue will cause people to be their best selves They know that some are usually bad and faithless, and the bad and faithless know that the Sages know this, but when they are treated well they are given a chance to be good and true. (報怨以德 in chapter 63 has somewhat the same intent. Another interpretation of these words is “The bad they also treat as good”, etc., which is a different slant, but which also works). “Respond to wrongs with generosity”).

Most texts have 德善, but some have 得tək “gain” for 德, and one has 直 drək “straight, upright”. 得tək “gain” makes sense here, and 德 in these lines is almost always interpreted as 得.(直 is presumably just a somewhat loose phonetic substitution). “Virtue” 德 tək and 得 tək “get” were pronounced the same and metaphorically associated as far back as the Shang dynasty, and I have puzzled about the use of 德 here. But in the end, I (like most others) decided that it’s just a phonetic substitution.

Chapter Sixty
*60

治大邦若烹小鮮 以道位天下 其鬼不神 非其鬼不神也 其神不傷人也 非其神不傷人也 聖人亦弗傷也 夫兩不相傷 故德交歸焉

Governing a great state is like cooking a small fish If you preside over the empire according to Dao the ghosts don’t show themselves — not that they don’t show themselves, they just don’t harm people — not just that the ghosts don’t harm people the Sages also will not harm them. The two do not harm one another and so blessing passes back and forth between them.

位 31 60 (立 泣 蒞)
立 24 25 31 60 62
傷 60 74 (and Shen Dao)
神 06 29 39 60
申 27 60 (for 神?)
屈 05 45
歸 14 16 20 21 28 34 51 60

Belief in the powers of ghosts and spirits (which could be earth spirits, ancestral spirits, or the vengeful ghosts of the angry dead) was almost universal in early China and survives to this day. It was thought that spirits emerged to emerge to punish wrongful conduct with disease or other calamities, and philosophers responded to this belief in various ways. In the Daodejing, 不道早已 “What is against Dao comes to an early end” in chapter 30 and 物或惡之 “There are things that abhor this” in chapter 31 are probably traces of this belief in nemesis, but in chapter 60 the Sage is shown neutralizing the power of the spirits, and most other Chinese philosophers tended to minimize the importance of the spirits in favor of an understanding of the general principles governing human life. (The Mohists were an exception to this: belief in the powers the spirits was central to their system).

Belief in spirits is associated with conditions of uncertainty, when people are powerless in the face of disease, famine, war, etc., and belief in malicious spirits and the possibility of witchcraft is characteristic of unstable societies without trust, in which everyone fears that unknown enemies are secretly working to harm them. As I read this chapter, the Sage’s example of virtue and benevolence has the effect of neutralizing this sort of toxic social network, making a healthier society possible and making the projected ghosts disappear.

“The ghosts don’t show themselves” 其鬼不神: I have interpreted 神 m-lin as 申 lhin “stretch out, extend, unroll” (the opposite of 屈 “shrink, reduce”). In one place In MWDA the character 申is actually used.

“The two don’t harm one another” 兩不相傷: as I understand it, “the two” are the Sage and the spirits, the two high powers in this passage, but others think they are the Sage and the people. In any case a benign situation of happy exchanges is described.

Chapters *59a – 60a

治人事天莫若嗇 治大邦 若烹小鮮

In governing men and serving Heaven there’s nothing like being sparing. Govern a large state the way you’d cook a small fish.

Speculation: the opening 7-syllable lines of chapters 59 and 60 are in neighboring chapters of the familiar text of the Daodejing and say almost exactly the same thing, and neither of them seems closely related to what follows in the chapter they’re in, and while they don’t rhyme and aren’t strictly parallel (the chapter 59 line divides 4+3, while the chapter 60 line divides 3+4), these two lines can be read as a couplet.

The closing lines of chapter 59 are among a group of banal chapter-ending passages which don’t seem to me to belong in the Daodejing, passages which aremostly just chains of buzzwords with little resonance with anything else in the Daodejing except one another. (The other passages are at the ends of chapters 16, 25, 52, and 55; all of these chapters are part of the early Guodian the GD text, though chapters 16 and 52 are included without the ending). I have no textual support for my conjecture, and the inclusion of the whole of chapter 59 in the Guodian text argues against it. But there is nothing impossible or terribly far-fetched about the idea that either this couplet once existed independently at some point , or that the opening lines of chapter 60 were written with the line in chapter 59 in mind.

Chapter Seventy-Seven
*77

和大怨 必有餘怨 安可以為善？ 是以聖人執左契 而不以責於人 有德司契 無德司徹 天道無親 恆與善人

When a serious grievance is settled some grievance always remains. How could it be made good? Therefore Sages keep the left hand token and do not collect their due. The virtuous keep the token, Those without virtue exact payment. The Dao of Heaven has no favorites It is always with the good.

天之道 / 天道 09 47 73 77 79 81
餘 20 24 53 54 77 79
足 23 28 33 35 37 41 44 46 48 64 77
損 42 48 77
為而弗有 (etc.) 02 10 34 61 77
賢 03 75 77 不肖 67
功成 (成功) 02 17 34 77
弗居 02 24 31 77

Here again the Sages and those with Dao are identified with opulence and generosity. The opening passage describes the principle of homeostasis, the principle of the thermostat. If a room gets too cold, the thermostat turns on the heater or turns off the air conditioner until the temperature reaches the set point. If the room gets too warm, the thermostat turns off the heater or turns on the air conditioner until the temperature reaches the set point. The temperature varies but always returns to where it belongs.

In this case, the Dao of Heaven is the thermostat, returning society to the original state of social equality, which for the Daodejing is the ideal. The Dao of Man, by contrast, wants change, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. However, as we are told in chapter 75 and elsewhere, it violates Dao for the rulers to live in luxury while the lowly are wretched, and retribution will follow in the form of revolt. Revolt, which punishes malefactors and returns conditions to their natural state, is thus here` identified with Dao of Heaven.

The homeostatic principles of reversal and return to normality exemplified here can be seen as conservative, and the “return to the origin” is a common theme in the Daodejing. The prinviple of return can be seen as leading to endless cyclic repetition on the model of the four seasons or phases of the moon, where nothing stays the same from one moment to the next, but the cycle of change is constant and regular. However, for the Daodejing things haven’t been normal for a long time, and the normal state to which the Daodejing hopes to return to is in the distant past (the origin), and to return to it would require massive changes to the status quo. Cyclic theories of rise and decline are often used in many cultures to justify political uprisings which are conservative or reactionary in ideology, but which can be progressive in effect.

Chapter Seventy-Nine
*79

和大怨 必有餘怨 安可以為善？ 是以聖人執左契 而不以責於人 有德司契 無德司徹 天道無親 恆與善人

When a serious grievance is settled some grievance always remains. How could it be made good? Therefore Sages keep the left hand token and do not collect their due. The virtuous keep the token, Those without virtue exact payment. The Dao of Heaven has no favorites It is always with the good.

和 02 04 18 55 56 79
怨 63 64 79
親 17 18 44 56 79

“Grievance” 怨 here doesn’t just mean feelings of resentment for being insulted, slighted, or taken for granted, but includes formal cases taken to the law or to a mediator claiming wrongdoing or (as here) demanding payment on a debt, and festering grievances can break out in violence. The point here is even that after a case has been settled by mediation or by a court, the relationship between the two parties is never as friendly as it formerly had been, and for this reason the Sage does not initiate cases or demand satisfaction.

“The Dao of Heaven has no favorites, it is always with the good man” (天道無親, 恆與善人) here overlaps in meaning with chapter 05’s “Heaven and Earth are not humane” (天地不仁). Confucian “Humaneness” (仁) is differentiated from the traditional principle of 德 “Virtue” by the fact that it manifests itself within the Confucian categories of relationship: kin and non-kin, superior and inferior, elder and junior, etc. (無親 in this chapter could also be translated “has no family”). But here and in chapter 81 the Dao of Heaven is described as benevolent, whereas Heaven and Earth in chapter 05 are objective and detached, like Shen Dao’s Heaven.

The MWDA version of this chapter has 右 “right”” where the others have 左 “left”. I thought at first that there might be something interesting here (as did Henricks), but the MWDA text also leaves out the verb of the sentence, 執, and I’m pretty sure this was just a scribal error. There is uncertainty anyway as to whether the left hand token goes to the debtor or the creditor, since there probably were historical and regional variations. The passage makes the most sense if the 左契 left token is the creditor’s token. (Needham’s Right and Left gathers examples from various cultures of the ways that the right / left polarity are treated in various cultures).

In the MWD texts, chapter 79 is the final chapter, instead of chapter 81. I cannot see any particular significance in this but it might be something worth thinking about.

Chapter Eighty-one
*81

聖人不積 既以為人 己愈有 既以與人 己愈多 天之道 利而不害 聖人之道 為而不爭

Sages don’t hoard When they have done something for others they are better off When they have given something to others They are richer The Way of Heaven benefits and doesn’t harm The Way of the Sages Acts but doesn’t compete

不爭 03 08 22 66 68 73 81
害 35 56 66 73 81
天之道 / 天道 09 47 73 77 79

Chapter 81 reiterates what has been said many times elsewhere about the Sages’ selflessness, uncontentiousness, and identification with others, and it serves to sum up Sage Dao and the Daodejing as a whole. The term non-action 無為 is never seen in chapters 67-81, and in chapter 81 (為而不爭 ) and chapter 77 (為而弗有) the Sages do act. Along with the emphasis on Heaven (chapters 07, 77, 79, 81) and the strong emphasis on the Sage’s impartiality and selfless generosity (chapters 07, 49, 77, 79 and 81) this is further evidence, for Perkins’ argument that chapters 67-81 are responses to (or developments of) Mohists’ 兼愛 universal love / impartial concern. (In my understanding of the Daodejing’s textual history, chapters 07, 49, and 60 are late chapters inserted earlier in the text to keep the division between Early Dao and Sage Dao from being too evident).

There is a tension between the statement in chapter 05 that Heaven and Earth are detached and “not humane” 天地不仁 and the statement that the Dao of Heaven “benefits and never harms” 利而不害 in this chapter and the statement that the Dao of Heaven “is always with the good man” 恆與善人 in chapter 79. Perhaps this is more evidence of a Mohist connection.

The opening lines of this chapter speak against wordiness, argumentation, and erudition and don’t seem especially connected to the rest of the chapter or the other chapters in this group, and I have moved them elsewhere.

Yang Dao 13 24 30 31 33 44 46
Body 50 51 52 55 56
Mother 04 05 06 10 28 14 15 16 20 21 25 56c 35a
Jixia 01 11 39 40 41 42 43 45 48
Anti Confucian 17 18 19 23a 38
Power of Dao 32 34 35 37

Note (3-26-23): I am posting this as a convenience for readers of my Sage Dao translation. I see many things I’d like to change, so please do not hold me accountable for what you read until I’ve revised it.

I.
EARLY DAO
Yang Dao

*13 GD

Favor and disgrace are like warnings; Honors and disasters are like your own person. What does this mean: “Favor and disgrace are like warnings”? The favored one is in the inferior position. Getting favor is like a warning; losing favor is like a warning. This is the meaning of “favor and disgrace are like warnings”. What does this mean: “Honor a disaster are like your own body”? The reason I have disasters is that I have a body. If I had no body what disaster could there be? So someone who regards care of their body as greater than rule of the empire might be entrusted with the empire; someone who prizes the care of their body more greatly then rule of the empire might be granted the empire.

*30 GD

Someone serving a ruler of men in accordance with Dao doesn’t use weapons to bully the world. These things tend to come back at you. Where an army has camped brambles and thorns grow. In the wake of a mighty army there will be famine years. A good commander gets the job done and that’s it. Dont push his advantage. Get the job done, but don’t brag. Get the job done, but without arrogance. Get the job done, but doesn’t bully. Get the job done if you can’t avoid that. This is the meaning of “Get the job done without bullying”. Wasted in your prime: this is against Dao. What is against Dao comes to an early end.

*31 GD

Now weapons are ominous devices. There are beings which despise them, and the man of Dao does not abide with them. They are not the tools of a gentleman Dispassion is best If they must be used. Do not glorify them. To glorify them is to delight in slaughter. Someone who delights in slaughter will never reach his goal in this world. At home a gentleman honors the left in the army he honors the right. In auspicious affairs we honor the left, At funerals, we honor the right. The lieutenant general stands on the left; the commanding general stands on the right. This means that the protocol for funerals is being followed. When masses of men are slaughtered, commemorate it with mourning and wailing. Once the battle is won, celebrate with funeral rites.

*24 Not GD

On tiptoes you’re unsteady. Overstriding gets you nowhere. Showoffs are not glorious. The narcissist gains no renown. The self-righteous are not admired The braggart accomplishes nothing. The self-important don’t last. In Dao these are called “Unclean food and outrageous behavior”. There are beings which abhor them, and the man of Dao does not abide with them. (24)

*44 GD

Name or body, which is dearer? Your body and your property, which is more precious? Gaining and losing, which is more harmful? The greedy waste the most. Hoarders lose the most. Know what is enough and you will not be disgraced Know when to stop and you will not be imperiled and may live long.

.

*46 GD

In an empire with Dao fast horses are sent to fertilize fields. In an empire without Dao warhorses are bred next to the capital. There is no crime greater than excessive desire. There’s no misfortune greater than not knowing what is enough. There is no calamity more grievous than desiring gain. The satisfaction of knowing what is enough is enduring satisfaction.

.

II.
The Body

*50 Not GD

Coming out is life, going back in is death. One in three are in the party of life, one in three are in the party of death, and those whose initiatives in living life lead them to death are also one in three. And why is this? Because they live for life I have heard it said that one good at grasping life crosses the wilds without fearing the rhinoceros or the tiger and enters battle without weapons or armor. The rhinoceros finds no place to drive its horn, the tiger finds no place to dig its claws the sword finds no place to sink its blade. And why is this? Because he has no place of death.

*51 not GD

Dao gives them life and Virtue cares for them. Events shape them and circumstances complete them. So all beings revere Dao and honor Virtue. Reverence for Dao, honor for Virtue — No one commands this, it just comes naturally. Dao gives them life and cares for them raises them and tends them, holds them up, heals them, nurtures them, shelters them So: it gives them life without possessing them, works with them without dominating them rears them without mastering them.. This is called the Dark Virtue.

*52 Not GD

The world has a beginning, call it the mother of the world . Once you’ve reached the mother you can understand the child, once you understand the child you can return to the mother to the end of your life safe from danger. Block the holes shut the doors — to the end of your life free of travail. Open the doors, increase your activities — to the end of your life beyond help.

*56b GD

Block the holes shut the doors soften the glare settle the dust blunt the edges loosen the knots — This is called the dark unity

*55a GD

One filled with the fullness of Virtue can be compared to a bare baby. Bees and wasps will not sting it, eagles and wolves will not not carry it off. Its bones and sinews are supple, but its grip is firm. It has never known the union of male and female, but its penis rises: the ultimate of vitality. It howls all day long but never gets hoarse: the ultimate of harmony.

.

III
The Mother

*04 Not GD

Dao is empty, but in use somehow it cannot be filled Deep!….like the ancestor of all beings…. Drowned!…. as if something were there. I do not know whose child it might be — it seems older than God

*05b GD

Isn’t the space between heaven and earth like a bellows? Empty but never exhausted, work it and more comes out

*06 Not GD

The valley spirit will never die: it is called the subtle female. The entry of the subtle female is called the root of heaven and earth. Gossamer, it seems to exist, use it without toil.

*10 Not GD

Carrying your soul and embracing oneness, can you never leave them? Concentrating your breath to extreme gentleness, can you become an infant? wiping and cleansing the dark mirror, can you become flawless? Cherishing the people and ordering the nation Can you not use knowledge? When Heaven’s gates open and shut, can you become a woman? Seeing clearly in every direction, can you not use knowledge? Give birth to them, rear them — give birth without owning them, raise them without ruling them: This is called dark virtue.

*28 Not GD

Not yet translated

*14a Not GD

You look for it without seeing it — it’s called minute. You listen for it without hearing it — it’s called faint; You grab it but can’t hold it — it’s called smooth. These three do not register and fuse into one. The One: Its topside is not bright, its underside not dim; Boundless, it cannot be named and returns to thinglessness.  It is called the formless form, the thing-less image, flurried and vast. Follow it and you don’t see its back. Meet it and you don’t see its face. So you can’t get close to it, And you can’t drive it away, You can’t help it, And you can’t harm it; You can’t ennoble it, And you can’t degrade it.

*56b

You cannot succeed in bringing it close and you cannot succeed in sending it away. You cannot succeed in benefiting it a nd you cannot succeed in harming it. You cannot succeed in honoring it, and you cannot succeed in denigrating it. Just so is it most honored in the world

*35b GD

The words of Dao are bland and flavorless. Look for them, and they’re barely visible Listen for them, and they’re barely audible But live them, and they’re inexhaustible.

*15 GD

The masters of ancient days were subtle, mysterious and darkly perceptive, deep and impossible to know If forced I will just praise them: Cautious, as though crossing a frozen stream Watchful, as though fearing the neighbors Correct, like a guest Yielding, like melting ice Solid, like lumber Mixed up, like muddy water Open, like a valley. The murky when stilled gradually clears The inert when stirred gradually quickens. He who accepts this Dao does not want fullness and so can be worn and not made new.

*16a GD

Utter emptiness is the ultimate Holding to stillness is integrity The myriad beings rise beside me, I sit and watch their return — Heaven’s beings are teeming, everything is returning to its root.

*20c not GD

Vast! – and not yet at the limit!   The crowd is cheerful, as if attending a feast or ascending a terrace in springtime. Only I am quiet and show nothing, like an infant who has not yet smiled; forlorn, like a dog with no home to go to. The crowd all have plenty, only I am lost. I have the mind of a fool – so confused! Normal people are radiant, only I am dim. Normal people are penetrating, only I am slack. Hurried! like the dark of the moon! Vast! as if with no home to return to. The crowd all have their angles — Only I am stubborn and crude. I want to be uniquely different from others and to honor the nurturing mother.

*21a Not GD

The ease of pervading virtue obeys only Tao. Tao as a thing — vast and vague! Vague and vast! Within it is an image. Vast and vague! Within it is a thing. Shadowy and dim! but in it there is an essence. This essence is very real a nd in it there is firmness.

*25 GD

Not yet translated

IV.
Jixia

*01 Not GD

The way that can be shown Is not the unvarying way. The name that can be called Is not the unvarying name. The nameless was the embryo of all things, Naming is the mother of all things. Thus: always, without intent you see the fine points and with intent you see the outcomes. These emerge together but are differently named, And together are called dark. Darkness upon darkness — the gateway to the many mysteries.

*11 Not GD

Thirty spokes meet in one hub The wagon’s usefulness is in what’s not there. Mold clay to make a pot. The pot’s usefulness is in what’s not there Cut windows and a door to make a room. The room’s usefulness is in what’s not there. What’s there is what you own What’s not there is what you use.

*40 GD

The movement of Dao is reversal, The action of Dao is gentle. The things of the world are born from presence, presence is born of absence.

*43 Not GD

The softest thing there is runs through the hardest thing there is. Something without substance penetrates something without gaps. From this is I know the value of wuwei. The wordless teaching, the value of wuwei – few in this world can attain these.

*39 Not GD

Not yet translated

*42b Not GD

Not yet translated

*41 Not GD

When the finest student hears the Way He barely can practice it. When the average student hears the Way Now he gets it, now he doesn’t. When the poor student hears the Way He laughs out loud. If he didn’t laugh it wouldn’t be the Way So the Proverbs have it: The bright Way seems dim The way forward seems to recede, The smooth way seems rough The highest eminence is like a valley The whitest white seems smudged The broadest virtue seems insufficient The established virtue seems sneaky The solidest reality seems unstable The greates square is without corners, The greatest vessel is last finished The finest music is soft The greatest image is shapeless. Dao is secret and nameless Only Dao is good at beginning and at completing.

*45 GD

The greatest completeness seems deficient but in practice it never wears out. The greatest fullness seems empty but in practice it is never exhausted. The greatest skill seems clumsy. The greatest uprightness seems crooked The greatest flourishing is humble. Activity overcomes cold, Stillness overcomes heat Clarity and stillness can set the world right.

*48 GD

Studying, you daily get more, Living Dao, you daily have less. Less, and again less, until you have reached wuwei – doing nothing, but getting everything done. . To get it all, never be busy. If you’re busy you’re not good enough to get it all.

V
Anti-Confucian

*23a Not GD

To speak sparingly is natural. A sudden storm doesn’t last all morning, A hard rain doesn’t last all day. Who makes these? Heaven and earth. If heaven and earth can’t make things last long, How much less can man?

*17 *18 *19 GD

The greatest ruler is just known to be there; The next best is praised and beloved; The next best is feared; And the worst is treated with contempt. The unreliable can rely on no one. How sparing are his proclamations! he finishes up, the job is done, and the people just say “We’re just naturally this way”.

Thus: when the Great Way fails you get benevolence and righteousness. When wisdom and craft appear you get the Big Lie. When family relationships are unsettled you get deference and filiality. When the state is in chaos you get upright ministers.

Get rid of sageliness and cast off wisdom and the people will be a hundred times better off. Get rid of benevolence and cast off righteousness and the people will return to filiality and compassion. Get rid of cleverness and cast off calculation and there will be no more thieves and bandits. These three sayings don’t seem quite complete, so an attachment is required: display the pure and embrace the simple, minimize selfishness and reduce desire

*38 Not GD

The highest virtue does not make gains, So it has virtue; The lesser virtue holds to its gains so it lacks virtue. The highest virtue does not act and does not impose categories, The highest benevolence acts but without imposing categories The highest righteousness acts by imposing categories The highest propriety does things and if anyone fails to respond it rolls up its sleeves and and drags them. So lose Dao and get Virtue, Lose virtue and get benevolence, Lose benevolence and get righteousness, Lose righteousness and get propriety. Now propriety is the husk of reliability and the beginning of confusion, Foreknowledge is the blossom of Dao but the first sign of stupidity. Thus a big player holds to the solid and not to the flimsy, holds to the fruit and not to the blossom, holding to the former and letting go of the latter.

VI.
Power of Dao

*32 GD

Dao is always nameless Though the primal simplicity is tiny, nothing in heaven or earth can master it If lords and princes could hold to it all things would submit themselves Heaven and earth would come together to send down sweet dew and without anyone’s command the people would live in harmony. Then names are first cut and once there are names, indeed should know to stop If you know when to stop you will be free of trouble Compare Dao in the world to the little valleys and the river and ocean.

*33 Not GD

If you understand others you are smart, If you understand yourself you are wise, If you conquer others you are powerful, If you conquer yourself you are strong. If you know what is enough you are rich…..

*34 Not GD

Not yet translated

*35a GD

Grasp the great image and the world proceeds. Proceeds without harm, Peace and harmony are complete. Music and treats make passing travelers stop by.

*37 GD

Not yet translated

Chapters 03, 12, 53, 75, and 80.

The Primitivist group is the most thematically consistent of any of the groups I have found in the Daodejing. All chapters in this group speak against the luxury of the royal court and in favor of a frugal lifestyle. A common theme is satisfaction with what you have as opposed to desire for something you’ve only seen or imagined. All of these themes are consistent with what came earlier in the Daodejing, but these chapters speak of nothing else.

None of these chapters are included of the GD text and their texts are unproblematic, and both of these facts argue for their being quite late. The Primitivists (as described in Graham’s Disputers of the Dao) were a widespread movement well represented in Zhuangzi but not necessarily always Daoist, and the concluding lines of chapter 80 are very similar to a passage in 胠篋 Qu Qie, a late chapter of Zhuangzi.

The Primitivist chapters reject all hierarchy and even the recognition of personal excellence (賢), and they especially speak against the opulent lifestyles of the rulers. Instead they propose a simple egalitarian lifestyle within which people do not seek exotic pleasures, and do not try try to distinguish themselves from others by the display of rarities like jewelry, fine fabrics, etc., In the rustic Primitivist utopia people concern themselves only with what is immediately at hand and do not compare their own lives with the lives of distant others or ask themselves how things might be different. Peace, order, and a quiet, satisfied populace are the goal.

Chapter 80 describes this utopia. This chapter speaks of a small, autonomous local community, with no mention of a state, and it might be called anarchist. At the same time, four of chapter 80 might describe a system in which the people are placid and play no active political role, and it could be adapted for authoritarian purposes. People who do not ask questions and are satisfied with what is near at hand are easy to govern.

CHAPTER THREE

不尚賢 使民不爭 不貴難得之貨 使民不為盜 不見可欲 使民不亂 是以聖人之治也 虛其心 實其腹 弱其志 強其骨 恆使民無知無欲也 使夫知者不敢也 弗為而已 則無不治

Do not elevate the worthy and the people will not compete. Do not prize scarce goods and the people will not become thieves. Do not display desirable objects and the people will not be disorderly. Thus the rule of the Sage empties their minds and fills their bellies weakens their wills and strengthens their bones. The people are always kept without knowledge and without desires so that the wise guys don’t act up. Don’t do these things, and there will be no disorder.

The emphasis here is in achieving order by not inviting comparisons between rich and poor, though it does not quite suggest abolishing class distinctions. The utopia described here is clearly recommended as a tool of government. “The knowing / smart guys” are treated as a threat – those who understand what is going on and can see ways of taking personal advantage, or of improving the system for the better, or both.

不尚賢: This is the rejection of a basic Mohist principle. The Mohists (against the Confucians) believed that the capable should be promoted to high office without regard for their family status. The Daodejing here opposes the establishment of any hierarchical class distinction of any kind — everyone should be in the same class as everyone else. This is consistent with the Daodejing’s general tendency to dissolve distinctions and reverse valuations. The Mohist or Confucian leader was assumed to be prominent and admired by all, whereas the 聖人 Sage of the Daodejing is obscure, just as the 德 Virtue of the Daodejing is not prominent, but obscure (玄德: 10, 61, 65).

賢 is often seen coupled with the contrasting term 不肖 in the pair “worthy / unworthy” (or “distinguished / undistinguished”). In Chapter 67 we read “Only because I am undistinguished can I be great” (夫唯不肖故能大), and chapter 77 speaks of the Sage’s unwillingness to be seen as worthy (若此其不欲見賢也). Only in chapter 75 is the word given its positive meaning, “superior”: “Only those who don’t strive for life
are superior at valuing life” (夫唯無以生 為者，是賢於貴 生)。

賢 Worthies: 03 75 77
盜 Thieves: 03 19 53 57
亂 Disorder: 03 18 38 64
難得之貨 Scarce goods: 03 12 64 (財貨有餘: 53)
腹 /心 Belly vs. mind 03
腹 / 目 belly vs. eye 12

Chapter Twelve

五色 使 人目盲 五音 使 人耳聾 五味 使 人口爽 馳騁田獵 使 人心發狂 難得之貨 使人行妨 是以聖人之治也 為腹而不為目 故去彼而取此

The five colors blind the eye The five tones deafen ear dead The five flavors numb the mouth Riding to the hounds craze the mind Scarce goods make you act wrongly Therefore the Sage’s rule Attends to the belly and not to the eye, Gets rid of the one and keeps the other.

The resemblances to chapter 03 are obvious,. This chapter is directed specifically to the lords, who are the only ones who can afford luxury, whereas chapter 03 states a general principle of government.

The MWDA text reads 明 “bright” instead of 盲 “blind”. The two words sound a little alike and this is presumably just a slip. There are a certain number of absent-minded scribal errors in the texts of the Daodejing, which is a little comforting for a scholar who sometimes makes absent-minded mistakes himself.

腹: 03, 12.
彼 / 此: 12, 38, 72.

Chapter Fifty-three

使我介然有知 行於大道 唯施是畏 大道甚夷 而民好徑 朝甚除 田甚蕪 倉甚虛 服文綵 帶利劍 厭飲食 財貨有餘 是謂盜兮非道也哉！

If I had the least bit of sense I’d walk the great Dao, and only fear straying The great Dao is smooth but the people prefer shortcuts The court is well kept The fields are weedy The storehouses are empty They wear embroidered robes carry sharp swords eat and drink their fill and have treasure in excess Call this banditry! Not Dao!

Puns here: 道 means Dao, but also simply “road” or “way”. In the last line, 道 “Dao” and 盜 “banditry”are pronounced much the same.

More preaching against the luxury of the court. Often enough in ancient China the court and the capital city prospered while the outlying areas (where the food was grown) starved. This state of affairs was not unique to China, and in China and elsewhere famine is often the result of government policy and the prelude to rebellion. It is especially during famines that people “cease to fear death” and are willing to rise up.

盜 Thieves: 03 19 53 57
盜兮 also reads 盜夸 and 盜竽. I have never been able to make sense of these readings.

Chapter Seventy Five

民之飢也 以其上食稅之多也 是以飢 民之難治也 以其上之有以為也 是以難治 民之輕死也 以其上求生之厚也 是以輕死 夫唯無以生為者 是賢貴生

The people starve because the higher-ups eat so much tax grain That’s why they starve The people are ungovernable because of their higher-ups’ meddling That’s why they’re ungovernable The people don’t fear death Because their higher-ups seek the fullness of life That’s why they don’t fear death Only those who don’t strive for life are excellent at valuing life

I have made the stanzas of this chapter parallel by inserting the word 上(from the Fuyi version in Jiang Xichang) into the third stanza.

The general point of this chapter is that the common people are starving, unruly, and ready to rise up in rebellion because of the excesses of the elite. “Striving for life” is tricky. The early chapters of the Daodejing urge that life should be prized more than such lesser goods as fame, wealth, and power, but here “seeking the fullness of life” is seen as harmful. I see this as a late development of the original doctrine, which first meant the preservation of life by avoiding the dangers of military service and court life, next developed into more positive nurturing of life by temperance, physical disciplines, and contemplation, and finally became the luxurious nurturing of life by rich foods and rare drugs. The point of this chapter is that this late version of “valuing life” was not the right way to value life.

輕死 75 / 重死 80. Similar themes in chapters 72, 73, and 74.

Chapter Eighty

小國寡民 使有什伯人之器而勿用 使民重死而[不]遠徙 雖有舟輿無所乘之 雖有甲兵無所陳之 使民復結繩而用之 甘其食 美其服 安其居 樂其俗 鄰國相望 雞犬之聲相聞 民至老死 不相往來 .………………………….

Let the state be small and the people few. Let the weapons for platoons and companies be unused. Let the people fear death and not travel afar. Though they have boats and carriages, they won’t ride them. Though they have weapons and armor, they won’t carry them. Let them return to knotted-cord recordkeeping Let their food be tasty, their clothing beautiful, their homes cozy, and their customs lovely. Though neighboring states can see one another and hear one another’s dogs and chickens, people will die of old age without making a visit.

A passage in a late chapter of Zhuangzi (胠篋) is almost word for word identical to the last 9 lines of this chapter: 樂其俗 / 安其居 / 安其居 / 樂其俗 / 雞狗之音相聞， / 至老死而不相往來.

Unlike the other four chapters in this group and most of the rest of Sage Dao, chapter 80 describes a hypothetical or imaginary ideal rather than critiquing the actual societies of that time. No central state is a factor here, and this chapter can be called anarchist for that reason. But it also describes an intensely conservative traditionalistic society, and the ideal shown here could be adapted for the use of an authoritarian government.