After Reading “Aesop’s Fables”
When I was young, people around me of the told me the story “The Shepherd’s Boy and the Wolf “ in order to educate me to be an honest person. At that age, in my opinion, it was just a story written by my parents or other people I knew to frighten me. As I grow older, I get to know that it is a fable from a very famous book “Aesop’s Fables”.
The book “Aesop’s Fables” wasn’t written by Aesop but was collected and anthologized by him. The working people created the stories in the book in ancient times. They created the stories using their living experiences and imagination, and then handed them down from generation to generation.
The book one of the precious cultural heritages. There’re more than one hundred fables in the book. The protagonists of most of the fables are animals or plants, which are depicted like human beings. This writing technique is called personification that is often used in fables and fairy tales.
Each fable that is short and understandable tells us a philosophy. There are two stories that impress me most. The first one is “ The tortoise and the Eagle”. A tortoise was complaining of her hard fate that no one would teach her to fly when an eagle hovered bear. He heard her lamentation and promised to take her a lift and float her in the air if she could give him some rewards. And then he carried her up in the sky suddenly he let her go. The poor tortoise fell down on a mountain. At the moment of death she cried:” I have deserved my present fates for what had I to do with wings and clouds, and who can with difficulty move about on the earth?” The story tells us if men had all they wished, they would be ruined. I quite agree with it. Take our personal lives for example. Everyone has his own merit and demerit. One is good at singing while another is good at dancing. Nobody can have all the skills that can be imagined. This is the reason why some people are fit for making decision while other people are suitable for carrying out the decision. So it is no need for us to be jealous of others as we have our own feature, which other haven’t.
The second one is “The Bear and the two Travelers”. It tells us that misfortune tests the sincerity of friends. People live among a group of friends of whom some are true friends while some are untrue friends. When you are in trouble, observe your friends attitude towards you, you’ll find who are your true friends and who are not.
“Aesop’s Fables” is a nice book for us to learn more philosophy of life and more useful new words.