36

The small dark light

What seeks to shrink

must first have grown;

what seeks weakness

surely was strong.

What seeks its ruin

must first have risen;

what seeks to take

has surely given.

This is called the small dark light:

the soft, the weak prevail

over the hard, the strong.

There is a third stanza in all the texts:

Fish should stay underwater:

the real means of rule

should be kept dark.

Or, more literally, “the State’s sharp weapons ought not to be shown to the people.” This Machiavellian truism seems such an anticlimax to the great theme stated in the first verses that I treat it as an intrusion, perhaps a commentator’s practical example of “the small dark light.”