Seven Days of Rest, Then the Hard Years
The seven days of the National Day holiday were gone before I noticed. Looking back, it was the first time I actually rested.
The long National Day breaks of the past few years, from my school years through starting a family: first the whole family together, then me deciding everything, then the two of us planning it. This year I finally lay at home for seven days. Lay there, and rested.
No urge to go out traveling the way I had when I was younger, and none of the tiredness of a trip. I finally gave myself a stretch of time to rest.
Eat when I wanted. Sleep when I wanted. That was the state.
I had not played computer games in a long time. I installed Plants vs. Zombies, Red Alert 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Hitman: Absolution, and Microsoft Flight Simulator. Each one I played for about an afternoon. It was a real pleasure. Plants vs. Zombies I played with my wife, the two of us working it out.
I finished Spider-Man: Brand New Day. To be a hero with a sense of what is right, and to protect the city, his friends, and the person he loves — that is hard for Spider-Man. However hard it gets, he keeps that decent grain.
Sleep. Sleep in the morning, sleep in the afternoon. That was about enough rest. Lately I have been too busy. The role changed from the person who carries the work out to the person who manages it. More things to do, more meetings, and real difficulties. I would be lying if I said I was not tired.
Then I had already been back at work for a day. Time to pull my mind in and do the work in my hands.
I am not young. A passage came to mind.
Twenty years spent getting out of the slum with everything I had. Ten years spent getting all the money, the name, and the position I wanted. Standing on the threshold of thirty-six, I found there was no road left ahead. Every goal I had used, when I was young, to fight hardship was empty overnight.
The thirties and forties are a hard stretch of a life. Sailor on Horseback, the life of Jack London, has an account of this stretch.
Jack London thought the thirties and forties the most painful years, because his own course and his inner bind sat squarely in them. It comes down to this:
Weightless, the moment the aim is reached. He had fought up from the bottom. Around thirty, The Call of the Wild made him famous at once. Money and a name both arrived, and he found every goal he had set for his life was already walked through. The point he had been striving toward was gone, and what was left was a hollow.
Nowhere to stand. He had seen through the falseness of the class above him, and the way up from the bottom was closed behind him. No road forward, no road back. Awake enough to know that no group would really take him in. He carried that loneliness alone.
The writing used up. Writing spends the person who does it. Through his thirties and forties he lived with the fear that nothing was left to write. Investments failed one after another, and the debts piled up. The mind and the work both gave way.
Body and mind at once. He had overdrawn his body for years. In his thirties and forties the kidney disease, the swelling, and the rest of the chronic illness all broke out. The pain wore the will down. At forty he chose to die, and that death is the mark of how far the pain of those years can go.