Misadventures in the Land of Fables #48

Writing is a journey of discovery, even re-writing or re-imagining or whatever it is I am doing in these misadventures, but the discovery is accidental and unpredictable. It only happens when things do not work out as planned. If your route proves unnavigable, if you take the wrong path, and you keep going, you may find yourself approaching your destination from an unexpected direction, or you may end up somewhere else entirely. It is this that reveals something about you, something you did not intend.

This week’s fable is an example. It is a revision of one of Aesop’s more obscure efforts (albeit one that is pegged near the top of the Perry list): ‘The Two Frogs By the Road‘

“TWO FROGS were neighbours. One inhabited a deep pond, far removed from public view; the other lived in a gully containing little water, and traversed by a country road. The Frog that lived in the pond warned his friend to change his residence and entreated him to come and live with him, saying that he would enjoy greater safety from danger and more abundant food. The other refused, saying that he felt it so very hard to leave a place to which he had become accustomed. A few days afterwards a heavy wagon passed through the gully and crushed him to death under its wheels.
A willful man will have his way to his own hurt.”

As I read, I imagined someone more adventurous than attached, someone who rejected the comforts and compromises of community, a rugged individualist, a settler, and also someone who would ultimately rather prefer to impose their own limits on others in the name of freedom, their freedom.

So I set out to revise the tale as a satire of this rugged individualism, picking at the brutality inherent in that attitude. I may have achieved that, to an extent, but the finished work produces, I think, a pathos that was not originally intended, and a characterisation far more equivocal, of both pioneer and exile, the intrepid and the lost, and the self-destructive.

You can read it here: ‘Two Frogs on the Road‘. Let me know what you think.