Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Leftover Food and a Tumour

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Leftover Food and a Tumour

The chapter ends on two of the most physically unpleasant images in the book. From the standpoint of the way, self-display and boasting are called leftover food and a tumour of an action, and it is said that things generally find such stuff disgusting, so a person who has the way does not stay with them.

The choice of images is deliberate and the two are not interchangeable. Leftover food is matter that was once good and is now surplus, past its moment, and offensive precisely because of what it used to be. A tumour is growth in the wrong place, an excess of the body's own ordinary process. Between them they name two different ways of having too much: keeping what should have been let go, and producing more of yourself than the situation has room for.

The phrase rendered things generally is the same construction used in chapter thirty-one about weapons, where fine weapons are called instruments of ill fortune that things generally detest. In both places the judgement is not attributed to heaven, to the sage or to any moral authority. It is attributed to things at large, as a kind of consensus of the world, and in both places the conclusion drawn is the same: one who has the way does not dwell there.

That is a distinctive move. The book rarely says that a behaviour is wrong. It says that a behaviour is repellent to the ordinary run of things, and that alignment with the ordinary run of things is what the way consists of, so the person who has it will simply not be found in that company.

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