A great many fables consist of nothing more than a brief dialogue. As a rule, these fables pass me by. They’re too obviously didactic, too dry, the juice squeezed out of them, the flesh stripped. The dialogue typically takes the form of answer to a question or challenge, an answer which articulates the moral. And […]

‘The Young Lady and the Looking-Glass‘ by William Wilkie claims to be a metaphor for how fables work. A mother puts a mirror in the corner where her spoiled and willful daughter goes to sulk and thus, by seeing her reflection in these moments, they young lady is confronted by the deformity her behaviour inflicts […]

Fruit falls from trees when ripe, if we don’t pick it, or if birds and insects and rodents don’t get to it first. Thinking about the Garden of Eden, I wondered what if the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil also fell? What if Eve found it on the ground and […]

“The Fables, then, must have grown up through many centuries in the country of their origin before setting out on their travels.” Continuing with my journey through Cooper’s ‘Argosy of Fables‘, I discover that some of the Persian tales are in fact Indian in origin and that I have encountered them before. I have passed […]