Du Fu
Ten Years in Chang'an
At dawn the rich man's gate, at dusk his horses' dust
Du Fu, Twenty-two Rhymes Presented to Assistant Director Wei Ji, c. 748
What ten years of not getting there actually looks like, and what Du Fu did with the record of it.
What actually happened?
He arrived in Chang'an at thirty-five to find a post and stayed ten years. He sat the examination, submitted rhapsodies, sent poems to anyone who might help, and got nothing worth having. In a poem to his patron Wei Ji he set down the days as they were: at dawn I knock at the gates of the rich, at dusk I follow the dust of their fat horses; leftover wine, cold scraps, and everywhere a hidden bitterness. Not self-mockery. Bookkeeping. At forty-four he was given charge of an armoury, and the rebellion broke out.
A decade with no result still needs a record
The easy way to handle ten years that produced nothing is to never mention them. He wrote down each stretch instead: whose door, what was left in the cup, how it felt. Written down, the decade exists. What later readers actually read is the failing.
Keep a record of the years that are not working, or they go blank on your own books too.
Cold scraps, written straight
He did not write that he was holding to an ideal. He wrote leftover wine and cold meat and a bitterness he kept to himself. A record that flatters nothing survives; the dignified version stops convincing even the person who wrote it.
Do not write that you are persevering. Write whose door you knocked on today and what it felt like.
Not arriving is not the same as not growing
Across those ten years the poems kept changing, from the confidence of a young man to something much heavier. The career went nowhere while the writing moved the whole time, and he did not think of the writing as the main thing.
Next to the thing that has not worked, look for the thing you have been doing all along that has.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you have put years into one thing, always just short, with no date in sight.
Ask first: have I written these years down as they actually were, and is there something beside the failing thing that has been growing?
Where it goes wrong: reading this as ten years of grit will pay off. His career never came good; the other thing did. This is about keeping the record and looking sideways, not about enduring.
Lines to keep
Ten years came to nothing, and he kept the books year by year.
A record you have flattered stops convincing you a few years later.
Beside the thing that never worked, something else was growing.
Same situation, other people are asking
I've been saying it for years and nobody listens.All these years of not making it — did I write any of it down?I planted it years ago and nothing has come up.I've been at this for years and it has never worked.It still hasn't worked · all 19 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.