Chapter 24

The chapter begins with two images of a person trying to do better than their own body allows. Standing on tiptoe, nobody stands steady. Taking long strides, nobody walks far.

Both are exact and both are testable, which is unusual in a book that mostly argues by paradox. Tiptoe adds height and removes balance. A stride longer than your natural one covers more ground per step and exhausts you sooner. In each case the gain is real, immediate and visible, and the cost is deferred and invisible until it arrives. That is the shape of every failure the chapter goes on to list.

The four clauses that follow are the negative form of the four in chapter twenty-two: showing yourself, thinking yourself right, boasting, taking pride. Set beside the two opening images, they are recast as the same kind of error. Self-display is standing on tiptoe. It raises you now and it cannot be sustained, and the person who does it is less visible over any period that matters, not more.

The chapter is one of the book's plainest, and it is worth noticing that it contains no mention of the way until its final sentence, no cosmology and no paradox that needs unpicking. What it offers is a physical analogy carried through to a conclusion about conduct, and it works whether or not the reader accepts anything else in the text.

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.