md
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Aesop Reredux
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May 21 18:52 UTC 1993 |
The animals staged a race between a tortoise and a hare.
The tortoise, urged on by well-meaning friends who assured him that
he was, in his own way, every bit as special as the hare, accepted
the challenge, at first with a stubborn determination to see it
through no matter what the outcome, and then (because his friends'
exhortations had begun to cloud his common sense) with a crazy but
irrepressible hope that victory might somehow be possible for him.
Despite the seeming pointlessness of the exercise, the hare, since
he could see no compelling reason to refuse, accepted with an
amused shrug, and was waiting there at the starting line when the
tortoise, accompanied by the cheers of his supporters, lumbered up.
At the sound of the starting shot the tortoise lurched forward,
placing one foot after the other at what for the hare was an
excruciatingly slow pace. The course laid out by the animals
consisted of one complete circuit of a pond in a clearing in the
woods. The hare, who could have completed it in a few seconds,
estimated that it would take the tortoise at least four hours at
the rate he was traveling.
The hare stood still, thinking what to do next and wondering what
he was doing there in the first place. As he watched the tortoise
make his slow way down the grassy path, he was tempted to dash
around to the finish line and have done with it. Then, the better
to please the crowd, he thought he might run to within a few feet
of the finish line, then wait for the tortoise to catch up with him
before shooting across to victory. He liked this idea better, but
it seemed a bit cruel to him. And so he walked as slowly as he
could up to where the tortoise had progressed (a distance of some
three feet) and sat down to think some more.
In this manner, the hare followed the tortoise all the way around
the pond. The tortoise never once stopped trudging along, but the
hare was compelled to spend most of the time sitting still and
thinking. It was the most time he had ever spent thinking about
anything in his life. He vacillated from one plan of action to
another. His thoughts ranged from the present situation to more
universal things. He considered his place in the world and
compared it to the tortoise's. He compared being big and hard and
heavy with being small and soft and fast. He tried to imagine what
it must be like to be a sober and cold-blooded creature that lived
for many decades, instead of fun-loving and hot-blooded and doomed
to die after only a few summers. After four hours of meditating he
hadn't decided which was better, or even whether one was better
than the other at all.
But by the time the finish line was in sight, the hare had attained
a degree of wisdom seldom attained by his kind. The first result
of it was that he had resolved to hang back and let the tortoise
cross the finish line first. After all, he had nothing to prove;
everyone knew he could win if he chose to do so. It would make the
tortoise happy, and it would be a gentlemanly thing to do. In this
way, both he and the tortoise would win.
The tortoise was indeed happy when he crossed the finish line ahead
of the hare. His supporters were positively ecstatic, clapping him
heartily on the shell and casting triumphant and, thought the hare,
rather snide looks in his direction. A frog who had been
particlarly vociferous in his support of the tortoise hopped over
and shook a tiny fist in the hare's face, and said, "I guess he
taught YOU a lesson, hare!"
For a long time after that, the hare found himself an outcast among
the animals. He was "the hare who'd been beaten by a tortoise," an
object of scorn and pity. (The tortoise, on the other hand, was
much in demand as an inspirational speaker.)
The hare was a bit stung by all of this at first, but he soon found
his circumstances rather enviable. No one ever challenged him to
races anymore, nothing exceptional was expected of him, and so he
was free to spend his days basking in the sun and eating sweet
clover. Once or twice he caught the tortoise standing and staring
at him, but he couldn't tell whether the expression on the
tortoise's face was one of contempt or one of envy. Whatever it
was, it wasn't very pretty.
Then one day a bird came flying over to the hare and said
breathlessly, "Have you heard? The 'possum challenged the tortoise
to cross The Road tomorrow, and the tortoise accepted!"
The hare was aghast. "But he'll be killed!" he exclaimed. "What
on earth made him think he could do it?"
"Because he beat you in the race," replied the bird. "He knows you
can cross The Road without getting hurt, and since he's faster than
you he figures he'll have no problem at all."
"But I only went across The Road and back one time, and that was
when I was young and stupid," protested the hare. "My grandfather
on my mother's side was killed trying to cross The Road!" But the
bird had already flown off to tell others the news. "I let him
win! How stupid can one tortoise be?" the hare shouted, to no one
in particular.
All day long the hare pondered what to do. Finally, he ran off to
try and reason with the tortoise. The tortoise wouldn't believe
that he'd let him win the race. He actually thought he'd won it
fair and square. The hare even offered to run another race with
him to prove what he was saying, but the tortoise only said, "You
can have your rematch after I cross The Road tomorrow."
In desperation the hare said, "All right, tell you what I'll do.
I'll race you across The Road tomorrow. Is that fair?"
The tortoise shrugged. "Sure, if you don't mind being beaten in
public again. I don't care. Just don't get in my way, okay?"
News of the rematch spread quickly, and the next morning at the
appointed time a huge crowd of animals was gathered by the side of
The Road. The tortoise's supporters were all there to cheer their
hero on. He stood shifting impatiently from foot to foot waiting
for the starting gun to sound. In the meanwhile, the hare looked
nervously down The Road in each direction as cars came speeding by
one quickly after another.
At the sound of the starting gun, the tortoise stepped forward.
Three cars had whizzed by before he even had both front feet on the
asphalt. He turned and looked back at the hare (who was standing
still only because he was waiting for a break in the traffic) and
said, "Can't keep up, eh, hare?"
In the time it took the tortoise to pronounce this sentence, the
hare saw his opening and shot across The Road at absolutely top
speed. It was awesome. The other animals let out a gasp in
unison, partly over the hare's speed and partly because, despite
his speed, he had just barely slipped by in front of a huge truck.
The wind from the truck blew up a cloud of dust and knocked a few
of the smaller animals off their feet.
When the dust had settled, there was the hare standing on the
opposite side of The Road. The tortoise gaped at him in
astonishment, hesitated, and then lowered his head in shame and
backed away from The Road. Seeing this, the hare breathed a sigh
of relief. With a wave across The Road at all his former friends,
he turned and vanished into the woods.
The hare never came back across The Road. (As he would have been
the first to admit, he was afraid to risk it again.) Only once in
a great while a bird would fly back from the other side with
stories about a wise old hare who lived alone on a great hill and
taught humility and self-control to all the animals there.
The tortoise withdrew into himself, figuratively and literally. He
became sullen and taciturn and wouldn't talk to anyone anymore. A
few mornings later, his horribly crushed body was found at the edge
of The Road where it had been run over. Whether his death was the
accidental result of foolish bravado, or the deliberate result of
equally foolish despair, no one ever knew.
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keats
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response 12 of 20:
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Jun 6 23:24 UTC 1993 |
looks like another case of the thrill-hungry public. notice that the ants
weren't at this race--probably, they were soberly about the business of
heaping up stores for the fall and winter. no doubt, though, that the
grasshopper, always an admirer of the hare, _was_ at the race, and although
the author doesn't mention him, i hope he learned some wisdom from his
hero and stopped frolicking every day.
of course, it's the tortise who pays for the appetite of the animal public--
their lust for one challenge after another, each more dangerous than the
last, ends up consuming him. celebrity is, we see, empty as a shell. sure...
a few slaps on the carapace, speaker's fees that turn first to nightcrawlers
and then to excrement, and then, finally, the tortise himself is no more
than a decaying blot on the pavement of fleeting fame. the animal public
goes on, though, vacillating meaninglessly between the craving for excite-
ment and satiety, and never understanding, like our heroic hare does, the
first thing about itself.
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md
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response 20 of 20:
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Jul 18 13:44 UTC 1995 |
When I read a version of this to my son, he objected to the
tragic ending. Up to that point, he says, it was the best
version of "The Tortoise and the Hare" he ever heard. I
tried changing the ending to have a wise old hare on that
side of the road and a wise old tortoise on this side, but
he didn't like that, either.
My daughter's reaction was interesting. When I got to the
part at the very end where no one knew whether the
tortoise's death was an accident or suicide, she immediately
asked, "Which was it?" I said, "No one ever found out."
"But Dad," she objected, "you wrote it, so *you* must know,
right? Which was it?"
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