DOCUMENT RECOVERED FROM BOOK
BURNING

Once there was a man who was given a great field to till for crops. He loved the warmth of his house so dearly that he spent less and less time going outdoors and began to forget the field altogether. Winter set in, and the man was even less inclined to step outside. Winter brought harsh blizzards, and when the man finally remembered his work, the field had become frozen under a bed of ice. The man began his great effort, but the further he worked, the colder and more miserable he felt. His friends told him that if he worked hard and long enough his body would warm and his work would no longer seem like a burden, but rather a blessing, for it would warm him in ways his house could not and the field would yield crops to give him sustenance.

As the man was working in the seemingly endless field, he happened upon a mysterious hot spring in the earth. Steam billowed from the spring in great tumbling clouds, and when he kneeled over it, the man could feel the generous warmth coming from the bubbling water. The field was so cold and the spring seemed so inviting that the man set down his tools and stepped into the water. What a wonderful sensation the man felt when his cold, rigid body slid into that hot water! He relaxed and sank in the water up to his eyes. All around him the blizzard blew on, but the man was warm and felt quite wonderful.

After a while had passed, however, the water began to make the man feel lightheaded and sickly. His skin swelled and pruned from being waterlogged. The man could no longer bear the hot spring, so he climbed out of the water. When he was back on dry land, the sting of the cold hit him with such ruthlessness that he nearly collapsed. His wet body now felt several times colder than he had felt when he was working, and his sickly dizziness from the hot water mixed with this feeling to very unpleasant results. Lifting his tools once again, he found that the work he had done had frozen over and he was forced to start all over again. So the man returned to the start of the field and set to work again, very much regretting his dip in the warm water.

When he reached the hot spring a second time, he remembered how wonderful it had felt to climb in. He tried to remind himself of the consequences and the regret he felt afterward, but his longing for the water was crying so loudly in his mind that he could consider little else, so he disrobed and climbed in.

Once again, the man grew ill and felt more miserable than ever before when he finally rose from the water. And once again, his work had to be restarted from the beginning. This time the man was angry with himself for his own foolishness. He felt ashamed and saddened in his heart that he had been entrusted with the field and was wasting all his time with something he regretted each time he did.

When the man reached the hot spring a third time, he worked right past it, confident he would never repeat that mistake again. And so he worked on for hours and hours. The sun rose and set, and like his friends had promised, his work produced its own genuine warmth and he felt great joy for his efforts which no longer seemed like efforts at all. He looked forward to dining on all his fresh crops. The days of his sloth and weakness seemed to be a thing of the distant past.

Many days later as the man was happily tilling the field, the memory of the hot spring suddenly occurred to him. This time he remembered his remorse and his shame, but he also recalled the superficial warmth of the inviting water and the memory seemed very nice to him. He pushed the thought aside and continued his work. The more he thought about the water feeling quite good, the more the cold got to him and the less warm his work made him. He thought to himself:

"Perhaps I will only let my feet into the water. There will be no harm in that."

And so the man returned to the hot spring, removed his shoes, and dangled his cold, brittle feet in the water. Certainly the relief was instant, and the man was very happy with his decision. He could only stand the hot water for so long, and when he finally retrieved his feet from the spring they were so damp and cold in the snowy air that the rest of his body grew twice as frigid.

"What a fool I have become once again," The man thought. "I believed I could choose at what level I would experience this awful spring, but the result is no different than when I was totally immersed."

Again racked with shame, the man found the field had iced over, and he returned to the beginning for a third time.

And this was how the man lived. Some days he would work joyfully without the hot spring ever crossing his mind. Other days the desire for the warm water was so strong it nearly incapacitated him. Some days he was victorious against the longing for the spring. Other days he succumbed.

When the one who had given the man the field finally came to see what crops he had yielded and congratulate the man for his valiant work, he found the field mostly frozen. A small sprinkling of meager crops was all that grew, and the man sat weeping in the snow, disgusted with his own weakness. He apologized to the one who had given him the field and explained his great struggle between his desire to work and his desire for the hot spring.

The one who had given the man the field was not angry; instead he offered to help him till the field. Together, they lifted their tools and began the work again.