Week 6_Reading 2


 

 

Sima Qian met with what throughout the ages was considered to be the gravest punishment (229tm*). The reason he was branded so was because he was misunderstood (230mb, 232m). While attempting to illuminate Li Ling’s merits so as to control slander, and give His Majesty a broader, clearer picture (232m), Sima instead was interpreted as attempting to deceive the Emperor and slander the Ershi General (232mb). Why was the relationship between Sima’s intention and its reception so broken? Was there anything that could be done about this dissonance?


In his Lament for Unemployed Gentlemen, Sima Qian speaks of the pain that comes with being born out of one’s time (line 1). This translates into living during a time where one’s talents, one’s intentions are unappreciated, even scathed; where said person is isolated, ignored, “hemmed in” (line 11). In line 9, Sima suggests that it isn’t poverty or success that marks a person’s worth, as often times said status is determined based on people’s understanding, their evaluations—and their evaluations are not dependable since people have difficulty distinguishing “between beauty and ugliness” (line 10). This poor capacity of people’s understanding, of their interpretation, is a sign of the times one lives in, the circumstances where one finds oneself. Is one a “fierce tiger” dwelling “in the deep hills” (233b), or is one the same said tiger, but no longer fierce due to the cage he’s now locked in (233b-234t)? The cage overawes and breaks the spirit of the tiger, taking away his fierceness, making him a victim of circumstance, of the times (234tm).


In Sima’s time, the people failed to distinguish him due to their faulty understanding, but he himself made distinctions of them. He categorizes people into the ordinary and the wise (236mb), the latter understanding him, the former failing to do so. In line 19, he speaks of his strengths—his brilliant, deep insight, his capacious understanding—while in line 20** he mentions “their” murky unenlightenment; in line 21 the poison within them. They are those who cease to understand his heart, his words (lines 22-25). Thus, Sima finds himself on the receiving end of a broken relationship—no matter what he does, it will be met with censure, his intentions (like helping others) having inverted consequences (injury) (228tm).


Sima concludes by suggesting that the best one can do is entrust oneself to the spontaneous (line 30), as the cycle between good and bad times moves in its own way, making constancy undependable (line 26). Therefore, one needs to adjust himself to the evanescence (“bobbing up and down with the times” (237tm)), so as to understand the times he’s been born into, and accordingly to find the best use for said circumstances. Both in death and in life (233m), one must find his way by knowing “full well the difference between what ought to be followed and what rejected” (235m). For Sima, his way—his raison d'etre—is his writing, and the potential it has to effect posterity (235mb, 236mb).

 

*From Sima Qian’s Letter to Ren An.

 

**The lines are misnumbered starting from line 20, but regardless I am counting down from the allotted numbering.

 

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