Family Instructions for the Yan Clan
Brothers drift apart on their own, and nobody turned bad
Once each has his own wife and children, feeling will not hold it
Family Instructions for the Yan Clan - 'Brothers', on those who share one form and one breath
You were raised by the same parents, so how did it get here. This chapter says the decay is structural.
What actually happened?
Yan Zhitui writes about brothers by starting with childhood: a parent leading one by each hand, one clutching the front of the robe and one the hem, the same table at meals, clothes handed down, lessons taken together, outings shared. Two people raised like that, he says, could not fail to love each other however bad their tempers. Then comes the second half. Once grown, each with his own wife and his own children, they could not fail to cool a little however decent their tempers.
Two impossibilities, pointing opposite ways
Could not fail to love; could not fail to cool. He uses the same construction twice in opposite directions. Nobody turned bad in between; what changed is that each acquired a household. Blaming character finds the wrong cause and therefore the wrong remedy.
Your last long conversation was years ago and you never had a row.
The people who arrive keep separate books
Wives of brothers, he says, stand further apart than the brothers do; measuring a close bond by a distant one is a square base under a round lid and will never fit. The later it gets, the less any of it is about two people.
An account two brothers settle in a sentence needs other arithmetic between two households.
When the parents go, so does the buffer
Once both parents are dead, he writes, brothers looking at each other should be as form to shadow and sound to echo. That is not sentiment. While the parents lived they absorbed a great deal in the middle; afterwards the brothers settle up directly, and that is when it breaks.
Settle what needs settling while the old people are still alive.
He follows the collapse all the way down
Brothers at odds and their sons are not close; sons not close and the cousins grow distant; cousins distant and even the servants turn into enemies. Layer after layer goes, until strangers can walk over you and nobody comes.
What one generation left unsaid, the next carries on as not speaking.
Gracious to the world, short with your brother
He puts a question rather than an argument: a man keeps company with the finest people everywhere and is warm to all of them, yet fails in respect towards his own elder brother. How can he manage the many and not the few.
The patience you spend on colleagues runs out in the last three steps home.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: there are several of you, your parents' care falls on you alone, the others cannot be moved, and you resent it and cannot say so.
Ask first: how much of 'how did he become like this' is really 'he has a household of his own now' - take that part off the account before working out what is left to discuss.
Where it goes wrong: reading it as permission to give up because cooling is natural. He argues the opposite. Precisely because it cools by itself, feeling cannot be left to hold it: settle things while the parents are alive, and put the visits in the calendar.
Lines to keep
Once each has his own household, staying close is the surprise.
A matter between brothers is never only between two people.
The patience left over from strangers is what comes home.
Same situation, other people are asking
My parents got old and I don't know what I can do.Taking care of him has emptied me out.There are four of us and I'm the only one doing it.Two years of caring for her and I broke first.Caring for a parent · all 7 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.