rén · yin — tetragrams 64–72 — 1 October to 10 November
It goes on getting darker for longer than you think it will.
Man in the region, and the province broken once beneath him. Both supports have given way, and this is the hardest stretch of the book. Nine figures in a row describe losing: light, position, company, motion, and finally the thread of the work itself. Nothing here is a punishment and nothing here is a test. It is a season, and it is the one everybody actually gets.
The beginning of winter falls at Hardness, the last figure of the province. The yin holds the yang in mind and the yang holds the yin, and what they want is down in the dark palace. Then the inside empties and the outside comes in, and the ten thousand things are finished; each leaves the other and things go wandering with nowhere to be. The yin climbs onto the yang, everything loses its light; the yin marches south and the yang north, and things lose the straightness of their light and go dim. The breath stops up the whole house of the world; the yang has nowhere left and things are at the end of themselves, in a hurry. The yin cuts, the shape hangs and wastes and in seven days is nearly gone. Above and below, everything stops. The province closes with the yin thickening over everything and things competing at being hard.
Ask this province what to do and it will tell you what is true instead. That is its whole method. The instruction is to stop treating the darkness as a problem with a solution — the figures here that go worst are the ones that hurry, and Exhaustion says so outright. If the reading falls in a night position, do not read it as doom; the alternation is regular and this province is simply where more of the night lies. Endure the accurate description. Do not harden. Hardness closes this province and it is not offered as an achievement: things compete at it only when the work has already lost its thread, and what sets hardest in the cold is what cracks first when the ground moves.