Thoughts on "New Morals for Aesop’s Fables" by Anthony Madrid (via The Paris Review)

I found a really good article the other day from The Paris Review titled: New Morals for Aesop’s Fables written by Anthony Madrid. Madrid quickly analyzes how ludacris (in the sense of how obvious they are as well as how we've come to take them as something like a fact) the morals of the old Greek fables are. In a clever way, Madrid breaks this down into sizable parts. Read it for some good insight (hyperlinked above).

While reading the article I realized that my favorite, and the only story I truly know, from Aesop is The Tortoise and the Hare. The moral we all take from this, usually without thinking twice, is something like: Slow and steady wins the race. 

But, if I were to take Madrid's unique viewpoint and re-write the obvious, maybe the moral would sound something more like: When the slow and steady creature sees the worn out competitor sleeping on the side of the road, it might be better to wake that one up and take a journey together. 

I dunno. 

But back to the article. This much I agree with. This much I believe is true:

"And so on, forever. It makes you want to write a set of a dozen parodies, in which you somehow find a way to spoof the meanness by taking it to some absurd level. However, there would be absolutely no point in doing that. Just look at Twitter, look at Facebook. We have maxed out on absurd levels.

Indeed, I predict that, five hundred years from now, if the human race still exists, scholars will be sifting through our hard drives, straining to comprehend the relationship between our stories and our morals, so to speak. In a state of perpetual mismatch, somebody’s going to have to figure out which part is the joke. Were we joking?"

God, I hope not. At least on my part, I'll try for something much more sublime. 

- F