When the government is not in evidence the people are honest and loyal.
When the government is meddlesome the people are in want.
Misery!—Happiness lies by its side! Happiness!—Misery lurks beneath. He who understands the end has progressed beyond limitations.
The regular becomes the irregular; the good becomes unpropitious. This has bewildered men from time immemorial!
Hence the Holy Man is a square which has not been cut, and whose corners have not been planed; he is straightforward without being reckless, and bright without being dazzling.
Translation: C. Spurgeon Medhurst, 1905 (public domain)
Sit With This
Which verdict are you most certain of right now — this was good fortune, this was bad — and what loosens if the two are leaning on each other?
A Practice
Take one event you have already filed as bad. Without forcing optimism, write down what is quietly leaning against its side — one thing it has opened, taught, or spared you. Then leave the file unclosed. The practice is the unclosed file.
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Western Commentary
The chapter opens with one more entry in the old ledger of unforced order: a government not in evidence leaves its people honest and loyal, while the meddlesome kind — touching everything, correcting everything — leaves them in want. It is the ancient observation of the previous chapter in a new key, and it is wisest taken inward, at the government of the self: the more minutely you police your own days and feelings, the more evasive and divided they become. And then, mid-thought, the verse drops its most famous lines — misery with happiness lying right at its side, happiness with misery lurking just beneath. Who knows what either will come to in the end?
Those two lines have steadied an entire civilisation, and they deserve a slow reading. They do not say that joy is secretly bad news, or that grief is secretly good. They say the two are entangled — each leaning on the other, each carrying the seed of the other — and that our verdicts are therefore always premature. You have lived this: the lost job that was ruin until it was rescue; the triumph that quietly cost what mattered more; the worst year that, seen from far enough downstream, was the hinge the good years turned on. The verse asks for the humility of the unclosed file: even correction itself, it warns, turns by degrees into distortion, and the good into its opposite, and we are slow to notice every time.
What does a person do inside such a world — stop judging, stop steering, go limp? The verse answers with geometry instead: be a square that has not been cut, whose corners have never been planed. Keep your own shape, that is — your principles, your straightness, your edge unworn-down, not filed smooth to flatter the room. And yet a square kept whole still has corners; the discipline the verse points to is to hold that edge without turning it on the people near you. Straightforward, but allowing yourself no license; principled, without making the principle a blade. In a world where good and ill trade places in the dark, the one thing you can govern is how much damage your own certainties do on their way through.
And the close gives the whole chapter its emblem: bright, but not dazzling. There is a light that illuminates the room and a light that makes everyone in it squint; the first is wisdom, the second is wisdom performing itself. The person this verse is building — unprying with others, unhurried in judgment, edged without cutting — gives off the first kind. People can see by them without being blinded by them. Of all the things the book asks of a strong and clear nature, this may be the gentlest and the hardest: to be fully lit, and leave the glare at home.