Body and daily life
Bai Juyi
The middle setting
Bai Juyi (Tang · 772-846) — The middle setting.
What actually happened?
He wrote about his own house like a man doing his accounts: ten mu of grounds, five of garden, one pool of water, a thousand stems of bamboo. This was Luoyang, where he lived from fifty-eight onwards. There was a small tower by the pool and a boat below it. He did not attend court, had almost no official business, and drew his salary every month. A man who had passed the examinations young, governed two of the richest cities in the empire and seen his poems copied everywhere had settled himself in neither the hills nor the court, but between them.
He picked a third way of living
His poem sorts people in three: the great recluse hides in the marketplace, the lesser in the hills. Both are refused - too loud, too bleak - and he takes the middle, hiding inside a post that has standing and pay but no daily grind.
All in or hand in your notice: most people are stuck because those are the only two options they can see.
He says what the setting runs on
The lines are blunt about money: no toil of mind or body, no hunger or cold, no business all year, a salary every month. The middle setting is not a mood. It is rank and income that other people recognise, and without both it collapses.
Before taking on less, check the year still balances without that income; if it does not, you will be pulled back in.
He never called it the ideal
The poem closes by putting him between hardship and success, between plenty and want. He is not offering the best answer but one that can be occupied for years. Read as transcendence, it loses the word he wrote: between.
Accepting a few years of neither excelling nor falling behind costs less than swinging between the two.
He knew in his lifetime what readers preferred
Demoted to Jiangzhou, he wrote to his friend Yuan Zhen sorting his poems into four kinds. He rated the satires on ordinary hardship highest; readers wanted the long narrative poem. His conclusion: what the age values is what I rank low.
The proposal you were proudest of goes unmentioned; a diagram you knocked out is forwarded everywhere.
Knowing it, he left his own order alone
He neither stopped writing satires to suit the audience nor argued that they were better. The same letter gives his resolution: the ambition is to serve everyone, the practice is to keep oneself in order - two different sizes, kept apart.
If you still rate the work nobody applauded, do not strike it off your own list because nobody applauded.
How do I use it today?
If you are stuck between cannot go on and dare not leave, stop choosing a side and write down what the third setting would need: where the income comes from, what it is called, and who recognises it. His post had rank and pay, and he could only reach it after a career as a senior governor; without those the middle setting is idleness with no money. Then do the second thing: keep two lists, the order of what the world takes and the order in your own head. That the work you laboured over went unwanted is not a reason to strike it off your own list. He did exactly this, and he did it in the year he was demoted.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
The hills are too bleak and the marketplace too loud.
It resembles serving and it resembles withdrawing.
Rank and salary hold the setting up, not a state of mind.
What the age values is what I rank low.