October 27
Whoever holds to the golden mean is spared the squalor of crumbling hovels and shuns the palace that others envy.
Odes (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Whoever holds to the golden mean is spared the squalor of crumbling hovels and shuns the palace that others envy.
The middle is hard to tell stories about. Hardship and splendour have their stories: the rise, the fall, the narrow escape. A life that knows neither, by contrast, seems almost uneventful, even to you.
Therein lies a peculiar difficulty. You notice the middle chiefly by what doesn't come: by worries you don't have and by eyes that don't rest on you. But what is missing is hard to value. It usually only stands out when it returns.
And so the wish can arise to make the middle into something worth showing, or to think little of it as mere standstill. Both measure it by standards that come from the edges. Perhaps the middle is not a place you will one day arrive at, but a balance you keep restoring, again and again, without it ever becoming visible from outside.
Whatever goes right in this leaves hardly a trace. You simply have time for other things.
