I Understood the Ancients Only After I Grew Up
On an ordinary weekend I eat and sleep. The point is to rest. This week was different. I read some poems by the ancients, and at a few lines I suddenly felt with them.
There are plenty of books at home. I rarely open them. When I do, and something holds me, I write it down and keep going on my phone on the commute. History, art, money, books about success, technical books: all of them turn up. It is not that my interests are wide. Reading is an input besides short videos and AI. The internet is full of recommendations that talk you into things, and of information broken into scraps. The scraps cross the mind like debris from a blast. They leave little that is useful, and a pile of junk.
Phoenix Mountain
Northern Song · Wang Anshi
The joy I would give to the years when I was young. In a life of a hundred years, the good things often come too late.
What use is wealth when the hair is white? Strength has already been worn down by worry and toil.
I wish I had been a careless young man of the Five Tombs, alive in the reigns of Zhenguan and Kaiyuan.
Cockfights and dog races for a whole life, knowing nothing of whether the world was safe.
If I had met this poem in school, I would most likely have been circling terms. What are the Five Tombs? Which years were Zhenguan and Kaiyuan? The lines themselves would have meant nothing.
He wants to give the joy to the time when he was young. In a hundred years, the good things often arrive too late. When the hair is white, what use is wealth? Strength has already been worn away by worry and work.
When I was young I thought rest was a waste. Go out. Study. Prove I had not stopped. But when a weekend really can be nothing but eating and sleeping, I am no longer the person who can play a whole day away and feel no guilt.
I happened to read this poem, and Wang Anshi did not seem to be sighing over age. He was saying: the ease you want, and the time when you still have the strength to enjoy it, often do not fall in the same year. So I think that when you are young, besides working hard for a career, you should also leave a little time to think, and to enjoy being young.
The last two lines are more direct. He says he wants to be a man of cockfights and dogs in a peaceful age, with no need to know whether the world is safe. He is not actually planning to go to a cockfight. Only after you have done the work, and carried it, do you understand what it means to not want to carry it anymore. Read in school, the man sounds passive. Read now, it is a plain sentence from someone who has actually carried things.
So the books still have to be opened, and the poems still have to be read. The next item an algorithm has chopped up and pushed in front of you is worse, on a commute, than reading again the one line you wrote down.