#russian fable

[labrat1952]

MARK THE RICH

MARK THE RICH In a country, in a kingdom far away, once upon a time there lived a merchant, Mark the Rich; and, what with all his estates an...

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[smiling-shoe]

My tumblr still does not work properly, but i did a Thing and really want to share it with you.

This is the edited version of a fable "The Dragonfly and the Ant", written by famous russian writer A. Krylov. Enjoy.

Joyful and carefree Dragonfly spent a wonderful summer, dancing in meadows, enjoying the rays of sun, gathering food everywhere she wanted to and cheerfully singing her nice songs. But the summer, like everything wonderful in this world, suddenly came to its end. The sun turned pale and faded, leaves on trees and grass on meadows became yellow and wilted, and Dragonfly could hardly find anything to eat. She wept for all summer days that had passed, recalling the memories of that times when everything was bright, and light, and easy, and happy.

The cold and tough winter broke out. Dragonfly was starving and craving for warmth. Desperate, she came to ask for help to her old friend, the Ant.

“Ant, my dear Ant”, she cried. “I am so cold and so hungry, I am not sure I will make it through! Could you please let me come in and stay with you for the whole winter?”

“But what were you doing throughout the summer? Why don’t you have enough food supplies for winter?”, Ant asked kindly.

“I was dancing and singing, enjoying warm summer days…”, she confessed.

Ant stayed thoughtfully for a minute.

“Well”, he finally said. “You must have improved your singing skills dramatically, right? Then you can stay. Winter is a long time of grief and loneliness, and it’s better to have somebody around. Will you sing for me to help me handle it? I am tired of being alone.”

Dragonfly listened to him in sympathy in her heart.

“Of course, dear Ant”, she answered. “In exchange for giving me food and shelter, I will sing and dance for you to brighten up your loneliness.”

She stayed with Ant for the whole winter. He feed and warmed her, and in her turn she sang him beautiful songs of joy and light. In the cold and dark evenings they were sitting near the fireplace, and Dragonfly were telling Ant lots of stories about the beauty of the summer, which he could have missed being too busy, preparing for the winter. And since then he had never felt lonely.

The moral: We all are different. We have different interests, different skills, different purposes, different attitude to work. We should not expect the dragonfly to build an anthill. Instead, we’d better take a closer look at each other. Cooperation will definitely bring more profit than discord.

[lacartaajena]

There were some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things. A CONFESSION was a book like that. In it, Tolstoy related a Russian fable about a man who, being chased by a monster, jumps into a well. As the man is falling down the well, however, he sees there’s a dragon at the bottom, waiting to eat him. Right then, the man notices a branch sticking out of the wall, and he grabs onto it, and hangs. This keeps the man from falling into the dragon’s jaws, or being eaten by the monster above, but it turns out there’s another little problem. Two mice, one black and one white, are scurrying around and around the branch, nibbling it. It’s only a matter of time before they will chew through the branch, causing the man to fall. As the man contemplates his inescapable fate, he notices something else: from the end of the branch he’s holding, a few drops of honey are dripping. The man sticks out his tongue to lick them. This, Tolstoy says, is our human predicament: we’re the man clutching the branch. Death awaits us. There is no escape. And so we distract ourselves by licking whatever drops of honey come within our reach. Most of what Mitchell read in college hadn’t conveyed Wisdom with a capital W. But this Russian fable did. It was true about people in general and it was true about Mitchell in particular. What were he and his friends doing, really, other than hanging from a branch, sticking their tongues out to catch the sweetness? He though about the people he knew, with their excellent young bodies, their summerhouses, their cool clothes, their potent drugs, their liberalism, their orgasms, their haircuts. Everything they did was either pleasurable in itself or engineered to bring pleasure down the line. Even the people he knew who were ‘political’ and who protested the war in El Salvador did so largely in order to bathe themselves in an attractively crusading light. And the artists were the worst, the painters and the writers, because they believed they were living for art when they were really feeding their narcissism. Mitchell had always prided himself on his discipline. He studied harder than anyone he knew. But that was just his way of tightening his grip on the branch.

From The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides