Misadventures in the Land of Fables #80
Many of Aesop’s fables are what you might call realist in the political sense. They contemplate power and counsel how best to accommodate it. They are cautionary. Think of ‘The Lion’s Share‘ or ‘The Wolf and the Lamb.’ Sometimes the powerful, the despotic are brought down. More often it is the overreaching fool, the greedy or the proud, who suffer the exemplary fate.
There are also fables in a more gentle mode. Wry observations of character, famously ‘The Fox and the Grapes’ and ‘The Tortoise and the Hare.’ A few, surprisingly few, provide positive advice. (Contrary to common perception, fables are not a well on which a life coach can readily draw.) It could be that I find these positive messages so uninteresting, so obvious that I forget them. The only one that comes to mind is ’The North Wind and the Sun,’ a fable you may well have heard cross-legged in school assembly aged six and three quarters.
‘The North Wind and the Sun’ is a descendant of the Mesopotamian dispute poem, a form in which two contenders enumerate their virtues in order to establish which of them is the most valuable. Here the question is resolved through action. A traveller comes along and the two meteorological forces challenge each other to relieve the man of his cloak. The North Wind goes first, but the harder it blows the tighter the traveller clings to the garment; the Sun prevails by raising the ambient temperature to the point where the man no longer needs or wants the extra layer of clothing.
Persuasion is more effective than force, encouragement trumps aggression, warmth beats cruelty.
I can’t argue with that. I agree. Force is a strategy of last resort. It can often prove counter-productive and the action here demonstrates the point. I would say, however, that the situation favoured the Sun. Cloaks are worn to protect against the cold, when it is warm, they are left at home. The Sun was bound to prevail. Ambrose Bierce must have had the same intuition because he published a version in which the traveller turns up naked.
“The Sun and the North Wind disputed which was the more powerful, and agreed that he should be declared victor who could the sooner strip a traveller of his clothes. So they waited until a traveller came by. But the traveller had been indiscreet enough to stay over night at a summer hotel, and had no clothes.”
Bierce’s spoils the contest and trivialises the message; it gets us nowhere. The point is rather that the North Wind should never have agreed to the challenge and would surely regret having done so. It would harbour a grudge. But one day a more favourable situation might present itself where it could seize the opportunity to resume the contest. This is the starting point for my version.
You can read it here: ‘The North Wind and the Sun’
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