Tao Te Ching XXIII

To use words but rarely is to be natural.

Hence a gusty wind cannot last all morning and a sudden downpour cannot last all day.  Who is it that produces these?  Heaven and earth.  If even heaven and earth cannot go on for ever, much less can humanity. That is why one follows the way.

A person of the way conforms to the way; a person of virtue conforms to virtue; a person of loss conforms to loss.  She who conforms to the way is gladly accepted by the way; he who conforms to virtue is gladly accepted by virtue; he who conforms to loss is gladly accepted by loss.

When there is not enough faith, there is lack of good faith.

But!

In this age of words, to use words incessantly is to be natural.  To cast oneself into the production, dissemination, gobbling, digestion, excreting, transformation, and production of words is to be relevant and modern.  Words are the artifice that have become natural and he who would conform to the world, to evolution, to power, must conform to words’ productive circulative necessity.  The natural is not a fixed fate, a static fact, an existential incarceration … but our creation, an urgent freedom, a matter of definition—maybe the matter of definition. 

Is the sage then about to be extinct?  If not, should she be?  This is the same as asking whether trees should be extinct.  Or air.  Or garlic or horses or dandelions or children. 

The sage looks at words, definitions, change, and present mores as you might look at the weather in the North Sea—here, there, come, gone, wet, dry, bright, dark, cool, warm.  And in each state the people nailing words to the clouds and the clouds heaving off to rain the words in the ocean where they are diluted and disappear.  The sage is a way of looking at words such that words lose their weight and substance.

The sage does not speak for the trees the way an ecologist might; for the ecologist typically is interested in the trees because he is interested in humanity.  Any commonsensical person knows that the trees have a better chance of being on earth far longer than we do—no need to worry about them.  But the sage is no more interested in humanity than the trees, no more interested in the Internet than in stone, and no more interested in ethics than sleep.  This is why the sage is not committed to the modern enterprise of communication, why she does not privilege words over water or talk over death.

If the sage were committed to virtue, she would not be a sage; if committed to suffering, she would be some other thing also.  If she were committed to anything that could be named, she would be no sage but whatever the naming calls forth as the expert or devotee in that naming.  So the virtuous affirm each other in their virtuousness, dancers in their dancing, peach merchants in their peach merchandizing, gamers in their gaming, thieves in their thieving, lovers in their loving, and saints in their sanctifying.  But no sage affirms the sage if she is truly a sage; any words are only smirking doubts.  Her only affirmation is silence and a caprice that is often gentle, and for these she waits.

If she is committed to anything, the sage is committed to shadows and that which has no name; so words are nothing special and she uses them when she feels like it, which isn’t all that often.