The old man at the pavilion

Ouyang Xiu wrote this essay about a pavilion in the hills of Chuzhou during his own period of political exile. It opens with a sentence in which the writer turns and looks around: after the mountains of Chuzhou, the hills, and after the hills, a path, and the sound of water running, and a pavilion on the point of a rock.

He walks us through a whole day: the sun rising and the forest opening, the clouds returning and the rocks darkening in shadow. Morning and evening in one sentence.

Then he describes the people there. The hunters coming back with their catch, the visitors drinking, and the old man among them, fifty years old, calling himself the drunkard.

The essay is famous for saying, in effect, that the old man's heart isn't in the wine. He drinks, but the joy he's describing is other people's joy, the pleasure of a town that's at ease. If he's drunk, it's on other people's good afternoon.

The phrase that carries the whole thing is the small one about giving the joy of the world back to the people. That's not much of a political programme. It's an emotion.

I read this when I'm cynical about work. The essay says that a person can find satisfaction in a place he didn't choose to be, among people who don't know what he wanted, by looking at what's going well in the background.

Which is a strange sentence to write in 2026 and true anyway. Some of the best afternoons of my life were unplanned, in a bad year, with people who had no idea they were helping.

MOJOWAY records the small pleasures of a bad year, so other people's joy stays visible when your own is thin.