Body and daily life
Du Fu
Left office at forty-eight
Du Fu (Tang · 712–770) — Left office at forty-eight.
What actually happened?
In the autumn of 761 a gale stripped the thatch off the hut at Chengdu and flung it across the river. Boys from the village carried some of it off in front of him; he shouted himself hoarse and came back to a roof that leaked all night, the bedding worn through and his children kicking it apart in their sleep. The poem he made of it does not end on his own misery. It ends on a wish for a great house of a thousand rooms that would shelter every cold and struggling scholar under heaven, and on the line that if that house stood he would be content to freeze to death in his own broken hut.
A decade with no result still needs a record
Ten years of nothing is easiest to handle by never mentioning it. He wrote it down instead: at dawn knocking at the gates of the rich, at dusk following the dust of their horses, leftover wine and cold scraps. Not I was holding to an ideal. A record that flatters nothing is the kind that survives.
Do not write that you are persevering. Write whose door you knocked on today and what it felt like.
Put the worst of it first
The Fengxian poem runs five hundred words about the suffering of an empire, and it opens with his own house. Shamed to be a father, no food, and so the boy died young. War and poverty and an absent career were all true and he names none of them. Owning it cleanly is what lets a thing finish.
I did not do it is enough. Everything that comes after because can be left off.
Starting again means a roof, not a rank
The first thing he did in Chengdu was put up somewhere to live, not look for another post. People rebuilding in middle age reach first for the title and the old standing. The desk comes after the roof, and the verdict too late usually comes from an option still held in reserve.
The first step in starting over is the smallest setup a life runs on, not the return of your old standing.
How do I use it today?
Take the years that are not working and write a page a month on them exactly as they were: what you tried, whom you asked, how it felt, with no language about perseverance in it. Then look beside the thing that has not worked for the thing that has been quietly growing the whole time. If the road you were on has closed, ask whether you are after a roof or after your old position.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
He put the thing he least wanted to write at the front.
The best of it was written in the hardest decade.