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A Chapter Short Enough to Be Suspicious

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A Chapter Short Enough to Be Suspicious

At around twenty characters, this is the smallest unit the received text treats as a chapter, and its size raises a question about what the chapter divisions are for.

The material reads as three separate sayings. A statement about motion, a statement about manner, and a cosmological claim about being and non-being. Nothing joins them grammatically and the third does not follow from the first two. In a text that elsewhere runs to several hundred characters under one number, grouping these three lines and calling the result a chapter is an editorial decision, and a different editor could have attached them to what stands on either side.

That is not a defect peculiar to this chapter. The eighty-one divisions were added during transmission and are not present as such in the earliest recovered material, and the recensions do not always agree about where a break falls. Chapter twenty opens with a line that some editors attach to chapter nineteen instead. Chapters twenty-two and twenty-four contain the same four propositions and are separated by a chapter that shares neither.

What follows for a reader is modest but real. A short chapter is not a distilled essence, and its brevity is not evidence that its author thought these three lines belonged together. It is a container, and the sayings inside it are the unit that was actually transmitted.

The compensating point is that this container has been read as a unit for a very long time, and the pairing of return with weakness in two lines has done more work in the reception of the book than either statement does where it is expounded at length.

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