“Aesop” (c.620—564 BCE?)
Fables (dates of origin various and unknown)
Translated and edited by Lloyd W. Daly as Aesop Without Morals (1961)

Roll 35: 93, which is the row for “Aesop,” who of course only has the one work listed: Fables.

If you’ll remember how we left off, our hero had just worked through a selection of La Fontaine’s fables and, finding them to have been a somewhat unsatisfying reading experience, decided not to press onward to greater heights of obsessive completism but declare that assignment done and roll again…

… so, yes. Fate cracked its whip. Or at least cracked its knuckles. “You think you can escape me? You think you can just pick up and leave whenever you want? If it’s fables you fear, then it is FABLES YOU SHALL HAVE!”

It’s like Jonah and the Whale. Or Job. Or something. For sure it’s like something, something with a big fat moral. If you see what I’m saying.

Actually, the moral, I think, is “spare the rod and spoil the child.” The child here being Fate. It got petulant and acted out when I took a stand, because I’ve been letting it walk all over me for all these years. But if I back down in the face of this tantrum I would just encourage it. Now that I’ve started to turn the tables, I need to carry through and be firm. So. I got this book out of the library. I kept it by my bed for two months and read a little bit most nights. It has 579 fables in it. I read 105 of them. I now declare I am done.

[

Incidentally, above, when I wrote out the scornful speech of Fate, I recognized that correctly it should end with an evil genie laugh of “mwah ha ha ha!” … but I simply could not bring myself to type that, because I despise on principle the institutionalization of “mwah” as the official first syllable of transcribed evil laughter, that being a noxious pseudo-playful development of the late 90s and a leading indicator of the LOLCATaclysm to come.

And yet I did feel the contextual temptation to type it, which pains and disturbs me to admit. Good god: might I have already typed “mwah ha ha ha” on this site at some point in the past 8 years? Sometimes I forget who I am and do terrible things. As Dr. Jekyll might say. Right before letting out Mr. Hyde’s terrifying cackle: “gfurahr harrh harrh harrh!”

(“Bwah ha ha ha” for explosive earthy laughter is just as grotesque a token of emotional counterfeit. Maybe moreso, since at least “mwah ha ha ha” is explicitly roleplay.)

]

If you have to read Aesop’s fables in a non-kiddie context, I endorse this edition, sadly out of print. The title is Aesop Without Morals because the morals, which date from long after the stories themselves and are generally asinine or inapt, have been relegated by the editor to an appendix, leaving the fables alone, to be read in their clearest, barest prose forms, which seems the correct way to encounter this fundamentally skeletal material. Rather than putting clothes and a hat on the skeleton in a vain attempt to make it more than it is. Daly knows what these things are and what they’re not and presents them appropriately.

What they are not is narratives. They are scenarios. In Daly’s introductory words:

If these fables were not intended to serve a moral and instructional purpose, were they brought together to serve any other purpose? The answer to this question is not, perhaps, too difficult to divine, for we know something of the place the fables occupy in our own consciousness. Pointed stories capable of a wide variety of applications have always been in demand. We have only to recall fishing in muddy waters, out of the frying pan into the fire, the goose that laid the golden eggs, the dog in the manger, the boy who cried wolf, the ant and the grasshopper, the hare and the tortoise, and the wolf in sheep’s clothing to realize the proverbial and paradigmatic function the stories serve with us. We depend on the very mention of a fable to say, “Oh, yes, everyone recognizes that kind of behavior; it’s just like that of the animal in the fable.”

Having had it put to me this way I couldn’t imagine seeing it any other way. Despite Fate’s efforts to provide a sequel to La Fontaine, whose insinuating snark made me uneasy, I found nothing like that here. This is definitely not a book of chiding moral lessons; it’s not even really a book of stories. It’s a book of ethical archetypes. It’s like a list of all possible situations. Someone will definitely want to use some of this stuff for stories. But these aren’t stories.

I felt like I was reading a dictionary of idioms.

And I liked that! My one real thought that I wanted to bring with me to this entry was that it is actually quite heartening to spend time appreciating creations of language art that are not yet literature. It made me feel good about humanity for exactly the same reason that they put a picture of bountiful raw oats tumbling out of a burlap sack on the back of your cereal box. This isn’t the thing you eat; it’s the building block of the thing you eat, and all the more stirring for it. These are beautifully artful building blocks, and I’m glad that they’re classics.

A dictionary of idioms could be genuinely inspiring and heartwarming in the same way. Isn’t the expression “it’s a piece of cake” a thing of beauty? Absolutely it is, in its category, and if Harold Bloom figured out a way to get “it’s a piece of cake” its own place on his canon, I’d endorse that. It makes me happy that we come up with these thoughts, images, groupings of words for each other and then trade in them and build our days out of them. And it’s wonderful to think that the ancient Greeks and Romans were coming up with such sturdy archetypes that we still like to think of them now. There will always be something richly marvelous about the image of those unreachable grapes and the disappointed fox slinking away. Glowing, like a stained-glass window. It all starts with thick and hearty 100% whole grain oats.

But only a horse could eat this book raw. Have you ever eaten dry raw oatmeal as a snack? I know I have. It’s good! But it doesn’t work. That’s how this was. Eventually you stop because, seriously, what are you doing?

Your excerpt:

85 The Pig and the Sheep
A pig got into a flock of sheep and fed with them. But once the shephered got hold of him, and he began to squeal and struggle. When the sheep found fault with him for making so much noise and said, “Doesn’t he catch us all the time? And we don’t cry,” he replied, “Yes, but it isn’t the same thing when he catches me. He’s after you for your wool or your milk, but it’s my meat he wants.”

86 The Thrush in the Myrtle Thicket
A thrush fed in a myrtle thicket and wouldn’t leave it because the berries were so sweet. But a fowler who observed her fondness for the spot spread his lime and caught her. As she was about to be killed, she said, “Alas! Because the food was so sweet I am to lose my life.”

87 The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs
Hermes was worshiped with unusual devotion by a man, and as a reward he gave the man a goose that laid golden eggs. The man couldn’t wait to reap the benefits gradually but, without any delay, he killed the goose on the supposition that it would be solid gold inside. He found out that it was all flesh inside, and so the result was that he was not only disappointed in his expectation but he also lost the eggs.

And so on and so on up to number 579. Perhaps there is a fable in here about some animal that foolishly prides itself on its singlemindedness, but I wouldn’t know because I stopped.

Here, if you want there to be a rule, I can make a rule: if my selection is not a single work but a body of work, I’m free to move on, if I like, after I’ve given it a month.

The book also includes a fictional “Life of Aesop” written in late antiquity, which undoubtedly has nothing to do with any historical Aesop, if there was one, and certainly sheds no light on the actual origin of these fables. I didn’t read it.

As a book of raw materials for creative play this probably can’t be topped. Any single one of these could provide the kernel for a work of any form, flavor or scope. And if you need to thicken your stew, just throw in another one.

The quick and desultory character of this entry is just another form of revenge on old man Fate. I can do what I like!

Gfurahr harrh harrh harrh!