Reading Notes: Aesop's Fables (Jacobs) Part A
I picked Aesop's Fables for my reading this week. The last time I read Aesop's fables were the kid's version in grade school. For awhile, I thought they were cute stories made up by adults to implicitly teach bits of life lessons across to children. Reading them now, I enjoyed reading both the narrative version and the prose version. Honestly, I would've been caught up in the language of the prose alone, but reading the narrative first helps for a quicker understanding of the prose--and then you realize how witty the short poems are!
A fun thing about fables that I've thought I had forgotten but is oddly stored idly in my memory: the symbolic nature of each animal. For example, a lion is a majestic king. The Ass is gentle and dumb. The fox is snarky and sly. Each animal has a character that many people would be familiar identifying with due to stories like Aesop's. I wonder how this ideal actually comes to be, though.
I wonder how confusing it might be if the animals had swapped personalities with one another. Would the animal kingdom be at chaos?
The stories can be categorized as the animals either receiving misfortune, playing trickery, and making alliances. Usually always a protagonist and antagonist.
A few words can make a really insightful look at something.
Not all of the fable are agreeable; or maybe the connotation is old.
Maybe I could make fables geared toward more modern-day life lessons.
Example:
Waking up late for school in the morning,
my iPhone's alarm failed to give warning,
I jump out of bed and run about in a huff,
rush in a panic looking for my stuff,
my shirt hooks the door till I'm soon on the floor
and I cry out "Oh, enough!"
Chaos breeds clumsiness.
Bibliography:
Joseph Jacobs
Aesop's Fables
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