(1984)
An impudent man threw a stone at the inventor of the fable. He struck him, and Aesop praised him: “Pretty good already,” he said and presented him with a small coin. “I’m afraid that’s all I have, but I want to show you where you can get it.” A rich and powerful man came along, and Aesop advised the impudent man to claim his prize from him. He did as he was told. He was arrested and made to suffer on the cross.
Phaedrus put this into verse in the third book of his fables. The Phrygian slave’s ruse of connecting the punishment of his abuser to an attack on a powerful man has been understood as a tribute to the spirit of the fable.
This is a far-ranging thought, one that well befits the spirit of the times. I read the fable as a hint about how important it is for the poor man, too, to carry at least a small coin about him. For the clever idea that the tiny initial success could be repeated and extended if only one were to pitch at a more wisely chosen target could, after all, not be made convincingly without having demonstrated in cash how it might work; what was left to show was only how more could be made. Nothing could have been bought with this sou, but it was exactly the right symbolic means to put the good face of him who could not fight back on the matter.
Now one might want to ask why Aesop himself had to appear in this fable and why it is not staged with the costumes of his bestiary. Unfortunately, the answer would have to be that animals cannot throw, at least not on target. But nor can they speak, and do they not do just that in the Aesopic corpus? It is for exactly this reason they must remain what they are in all other respects.
The later it is in antiquity, the more variable the roles of the gods become. In a lyric fable of Babrios from the second century, Zeus, Poseidon, and Athena engage in an art competition. Zeus makes the human, the most sublime creature of all. Athena, being helpful to the father, builds a house for the human; Poseidon, always idiosyncratic, creates a bull. Momos is appointed the judge, as he is said to be a reliable critic. He finds that the horns are incorrectly placed on the bull, that the human lacks a window to look into his soul, and he complains that the house lacks the wheels that would allow for a change of abode.
Those are not very deep insights, one might think—had not a commentator acquainted with the modern world added that the critic’s last complaint was recently addressed by the invention of the motor home.
It is thus worth reconsidering whether Momos would have approved of the achievement. Though in possession of many motor homes, the residential mobility of humans has thoroughly decreased. Their wheeled dwellings bring them so much pleasure because they are the very exception to sedentarism. It is not the house of Athena that has been put on wheels, but only its miniature, in order to leave behind one’s permanent residence for a matter of days or weeks yet also to come home to it. Coming home to a stable normality is what is required for the episode of wandering to have experiential value.
As for the complaint about the windowlessness of the human, the commentator unexpectedly provides proof that Momos must have missed something about the nature of humans. A window in the chest would only lead to the application of a procedure that every motor home demonstrates in some variety: curtains would have been put up. Humans still exercise their right to opacity when they put the reduction of their residential castle onto wheels. Leibniz was right against Momos; his creature, the monad, is windowless.
The Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives recorded the fable of the peasant who killed a donkey because it swallowed the moon while drinking from a bucket, and because the world could sooner do without a donkey than without heaven’s lamp.
This fable can be read in different ways.
The peasant certainly lacked enlightenment. Otherwise he would have known that the moon would not be affected by a donkey making its reflection disappear from the water’s surface.
But did the donkey—and for that reason, it had to be a donkey—not simply deserve to die because it did not pause in awe before the reflection of heaven’s light, which would have allowed a piece of beauty to remain in the world?
The peasant was right: When in doubt, one has to treat the world so carefully as to prevent the slightest possibility of damaging it. Could there not be a secret spell that causes the moon to wane and disappear, because peasants let their donkeys guzzle away its reflection?
And then there is the type of reader who always knows best: the peasant killed the donkey because he felt like some donkey meat, but because he was a peasant, he was also looking for an excuse that would lay on the donkey the complete blame for being slaughtered.
No, says one last reader, that is not yet the whole truth. The peasant kills the donkey because more money was offered to him for the donkey’s meat than the donkey was worth to him. He tells the buyer the story about the moonlight only to prevent him from realizing that it had been about the money all along.
Translated by Florian Fuchs
Originally published as “Vom Unverstand: Glossen zu drei Fabeln,” from Neue Zürcher Zeitung, March 24, 1984, 67.