rén · rén — tetragrams 73–81 — 10 November to 21 December
The end of the road is where the next one is made.
Both fixed lines twice-broken: man in the region and man in the province, the furthest point from where the book began. This is the mirror of the Hidden Province, and it arrives at the same place from the far side. The first nine were a beginning nobody could see. These nine are an ending that turns, without announcement, back into one.
The season runs from the beginning of winter to the solstice, closing the year. The yin turns clear and cold, the yang hides itself in the ground, and things are carried over into shape. Then the worst of the book: yin and yang stumble together and their harm makes the ten thousand things weep; the yin turns thief on a great scale and things fall into water nobody has sounded; the tearing-apart reaches its worst with nothing of its own kind left. After that the dark goes mixed and edgeless, with no one able to see where it is rooted — and inside that, the turn. The yin carries things over above while the yang stretches, about to return, and begins again below. Water sets, the ground splits, the yang lies weak in the deep. The great yin freezes hard and shrinks back hurt on the outside while the faint yang pushes at the dark and puts its back into it, within. The book ends with the yin packed full across the open country and the yang brooding over the ten thousand things, reddening them underneath.
This province answers questions about endings, and it will not let you have a clean one. Completion stands first here, not last — what you called the end was the seventy-third figure out of eighty-one, and eight more followed it. Read a figure from this province as a statement about what is being handed on. Loss and Extremity are not the final word on the matter; The Verge and Toil come after them, and the work they describe is invisible, unwitnessed, and done in the cold. Two appraisals stand outside the count and close the year: one short, one over. Take them as the Mystery’s last instruction to the diviner — the year does not come out even, the leftover is where things get born, and there is no end to the handing-on. When the last figure is Nourishing, what it feeds is the first.