I picked up this book to balance out the fucking depressing Thérèse Raquin as I was losing faith in humanity. Every once in a while, a children’s book can lift you up as it often teaches you the other side of the coin — that you should have faith in humanity. Except Aesop’s fables just make me even more fucking depressed. Sure there are moral lessons to be learned here, and for each one of his fables, you would have probably come across an example based on your own experiences.
For this Aesop’s Fables are timeless. Aesop, as far we know, a Greek slave, is able to tap into humanity to expose its flaws. Admittedly, it is unlikely that Aesop created all the fables himself but he was a source of these fables that has been passed on from generations past, as it is still being passed on now. We know little else about Aesop but he may have looked something like this:
The world through Aesop’s lenses does not look on humanity kindly. Men (in this case animals representing men), are apt to take advantage of one another, the strong fully exploits the weak, the cunning connives on the dumb. Aesop’s fables are stoic in nature — to accept rather than to fight your own nature, just as the fox won’t turn into a panda or a tiger into a rabbit. Oftentimes, animals on the verge of their death from having made a bad decision will regret their decision, as a lesson too late to learn instead of spiting the animal about to kill him.
I still learn my lessons from fables like these. Simple stories are often the ones that stay with you the longest and tend to have the biggest impact to your character, especially growing up. We can see the animals as representing a human trait, a seminal trait to somebody, maybe. Thus, a fox is a cunning and conniving individual, a wolf as a brutal opportunist, the lamb the innocent and so on. But can we change our nature though? Will someone who is by nature a fox will remain a fox and not a wolf at some point in his life, or a lion? Sometimes I feel like a lion and oftentimes I’m a sheep. I hardly ever am a fox or a wolf, my parents raised me better than that.
As some children’s books, we can argue that it is more relevant for the adult reading them than actual children that these books are marketed to. Like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Aesop’s Fables offer valuable lessons in the business world. In fact, reading the book reminded me of my political science major where we see diplomacy as the first step to warfare. Some of the lessons may be repetitive perhaps. As far as we know, there are over 700 fables, and though the Wordsworth edition included a fair portion of that, we can substitute some of the animals for some of the stories and the morals would be the same.
My highlights:
- The Old Woman and the Wine Jar: An old woman found an old wine jar and savours the aroma left behind. Sometimes we don’t appreciate the simple things that somebody else would. We take much for granted.
- The Cobbler Turned Doctor: An unsuccessful cobbler tried his way on medicine and somehow became an overnight success. But when asked to try his medicine to cure a poison, he refused. I see a lot of this on finance and business experts that flail their thoughts in social media, and those poor souls who follow them.
- Hercules and Minerva: Hercules found an apple which keeps doubling in size as he keeps stomping it. The apple should have remained small if he had just left it, just as our problems can remain small if we leave it behind.
