Chapter 20

Chapter twenty is unlike anything else in the book. It abandons the impersonal voice, and a speaker appears who is miserable.

Everyone else is cheerful, as if at a great feast or climbing a terrace in spring. I alone am unmoved, without any sign, like an infant that has not yet smiled, listless, with nowhere to go home to. Everyone else has more than enough; I alone seem to have lost everything. Mine is the mind of a fool, muddled. Ordinary people are bright, I am dim; ordinary people are sharp, I am dull. I am drifting like the sea, blown about with nowhere to stop. Everyone else has something to do; I alone am obstinate and boorish.

The passage has no parallel in the rest of the text. Everywhere else the sage's position is presented as an advantage, sometimes a concealed one, and here it is presented from inside as isolation and loss without any compensation offered until the last line.

It also has no obvious philosophical work to do. It argues nothing, states no principle, and gives no instruction. What it does is show the cost of a position the book recommends throughout, which is a kind of honesty the rest of the text does not attempt.

Readers have taken it as autobiography, as a persona, as satire on the pretensions of the withdrawn, and as the most sincere thing in the book. It supports all four.

Chapter twenty ends on a single line that turns the whole complaint: I alone am different, and value being fed by the mother.

The image is the book's standing one for the source, appearing in chapter one, in chapter twenty-five where the nameless thing might be the mother of the world, and in chapter fifty-two where the mother is held to after the children are known. Here it is used at its most intimate, in the ordinary sense of an infant at the breast, which is prepared for by the earlier line about an infant that has not yet smiled.

What the line does is supply, in eight characters, the compensation the preceding twenty lines withheld. Everyone else is fed by the feast, which comes to an end. The speaker is fed by the source of feasts, which does not.

The chapter also opens with a line that some editors attach to the end of chapter nineteen instead: abandon learning and be free of worry. Where it belongs is a real textual question and the manuscripts do not settle it, which is one more instance of the chapter divisions being an editorial layer rather than a feature of the text.

Read with that line at its head, the chapter becomes an illustration of what abandoning learning actually costs: not serenity, but standing outside everything the people around you find sufficient, and having only the source to go on.