ren & yi

 Ren and Stmp-yi 

Her friend Maggie said to her, Roz tells me: “Ted seems really sweet.” She said it, I imagine, to commiserate. She meant, “I can see he’s not much, and (frankly) I can’t see why you stay with him (except maybe out of habit), but ... ‘He seems really sweet.’”
     “Do you mean ‘kind’? He tries to be,’ Roz says she replied. “I didn’t add,” she says, “‘especially to the dead.’” She is thinking that I’ve just driven two-and-a-half hours over and two-and-a-half hours back to put flowers on Moira’s grave, when there was, of course, no Moira — nor was there anyone else — to appreciate them. I was on the road five hours, and I am not that good a driver — according to Roz. She doesn’t like me out by myself; I don’t pay attention.

Why did I do that, make the drive for no one there? I don’t know but not because I am kind, I hope, or not out of what Chuang Tzu (Zhuang Zhou) calls “benevolence” (ren), which he pairs with “righteousness” (yi), both of which tend to do far more harm than good. Because they are ways – unnatural ways – of judgment, of getting in between where people are and where they are going, because we can’t stay out of their business.
     I may be wrong about this, about what Chuang Tzu intends; but this does seem true to me: One of the great – if not greatest – unkindnesses is meddling. Which is what you do when you think you know someone else better than he or she knows him or herself. You become righteous because you know what’s best for them; then you become benevolent because, dammit, you need to do something about it. 

That’s it. I love the way in Tom Jones Fielding spins these “essay chapters” out, but sweet as I may be, I lack his amiable gas.
                                                                            11.20.21