The Taoist Farmer
A farmer named Sei Weng owned a beautiful mare which was praised far and wide. One day this wonderful horse disappeared. The people of his village offered sympathy to Sei Weng for his great misfortune. Sei Weng said simply, "What makes you think this is bad?"
A few days later the lost mare returned, followed by a whole herd of wild horses, led by a beautiful wild stallion. The village congratulated Sei Weng for his great good fortune. He said, "What makes you think this is good?"
Some time later, Sei Weng's only son, while riding the stallion, fell off and broke his leg. The village people once again expressed their sympathy at Sei Weng's misfortune. Sei Weng again said, "What makes you think this is bad?"
Soon after, a war broke out and all the young men of the village except Sei Weng's lame son were drafted and sent into a horrible battle. The village people were amazed as Sei Weng's good luck. But Sei Weng only replied, "What makes you think this is good?"
The Emperor's New Clothes
by Hans Christian Andersen
Many, many years ago there was an emperor who was so terribly fond of beautiful new clothes that he spent all his money on his attire. He did not care about his soldiers, or attending the theater, or even going for a drive in the park, unless it was to show off his new clothes He had an outfit for every hour of the day. And just as we say, "The king is in his council chamber," his subjects used to say, "The emperor is in his clothes closet."
In the large town where the emperor's palace was, life was gay and happy; and every day new visitors arrived. One day two swindlers came. They told everybody that they were weavers and that they could weave the most marvelous cloth. Not only were the colors and the patterns of their material extraordinarily beautiful, but the cloth had the strange quality of being invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office or unforgivably stupid.
"This is truly marvelous," thought the emperor. "Now if I had robes cut from that material, I should know which of my councilors was unfit for his office, and I would be able to pick out my clever subjects myself. They must weave some material for me!" And he gave the swindlers a lot of money so they could start working at once.
They set up a loom and acted as if they were weaving, but the loom was empty. The fine silk and gold threads they demanded from the emperor they never used, but hid them in their own knapsacks. Late into the night they would sit before their empty loom, pretending to weave.
"I would like to know how they are getting along," thought the emperor, but his heart beat strangely when he remembered that those who were stupid or unfit for their office would not be able to see the material. Not that he was really worried that this would happen to him. Still, it might be better to send someone else the first time and see how he fared. Everybody in town had heard about the cloth's magic quality and most of them could hardly wait to find out how stupid or unworthy their neighbors were.
"I shall send my faithful prime minister over to see how the weavers are getting along," thought the emperor. "He will know how to judge the material, for he is both clever and fit for his office, if any man is."
The good-natured old man stepped into the room where the weavers were working and saw the empty loom. He closed his eyes and opened them again. "God preserve me!" he thought. "I cannot see a thing!" But he didn't say it out loud.
The swindlers asked him to step a little closer to the loom so that he could admire the intricate patterns and marvelous colors of the material they were weaving. They both pointed to the empty loom and the poor old prime minister opened his eyes as wide as he could; but it didn't help, he still couldn't see anything.
"Am I stupid?" he thought. "I can't believe it, but if it is so, it is best that no one finds out about it. But maybe I am not fit for my office. No, that is worse, I'd better not admit that I can't see what they are weaving."
"Tell us what you think of it," demanded one of the swindlers.
"It is beautiful. It is very lovely," mumbled the old prime minister, adjusting his glasses. "What patterns! What colors! I shall tell the emperor that it pleases me ever so much."
"That is a compliment," both the weavers said; and now they described the patterns and told which shades of color they had used. The prime minister listened attentively, so that he could repeat their words to the emperor; and that is exactly what he did.
The two swindlers demanded more money, and more silk and gold thread. They said they had to use it for their weaving, but their loom remained as empty as ever.
Soon the emperor sent another of his trusted councilors to see how the work was progressing. He looked and looked just as the prime minister had, but since there was nothing to be seen, he didn't see anything.
"Isn't it a marvelous piece of material?" asked one of the swindlers; and they both began to describe the beauty of their cloth again.
"I am not stupid," thought the emperor's councilor. That is strange; but I'd better not admit it to anyone." And he started to praise the material, which he could not see, for the loveliness of its patterns and colors.
"I think it is the most charming piece of material I have ever seen," declared the councilor to the emperor.
Everyone in town was talking about the marvelous cloth that the swindlers were weaving.
At last the emperor himself decided to see it before it was removed from the loom. Attended by the most important people in the empire, among them the prime minister and the councilor who had been there before, the emperor entered the room where the weavers were weaving furiously on their empty loom.
"Isn't it magnifique?" asked the prime minister.
"Your majesty, look at the colors and the patterns," said the councilor.
And the two old gentlemen pointed to the empty loom, believing that all the rest of the company could see the cloth.
"What!" thought the emperor. "I can't see a thing! Why, this is a disaster! Am I stupid? Am I unfit to be emperor? Oh, it is too horrible!" Aloud he said, "It is very lovely, it has my approval," while he nodded his head and looked at the empty loom.
All of the councilors, ministers, and men of great importance who had come with him stared and stared; but they saw no more than the emperor had seen, and they said the same thing that he had said, "It is lovely." And they advised him to have clothes cut and sewn, so that he could wear them in the procession at the next great celebration.
"It is magnificent! Beautiful! Excellent!" All of their mouths agreed, though none of their eyes had seen anything. The two swindlers were decorated, and given the title "Royal Knight of the Loom."
The night before the procession, the two swindlers didn't sleep at all. They had sixteen candles lighting up the room where they worked. Everyone could see how busy they were, getting the emperor's new clothes finished. They pretended to take the cloth from the loom; they cut the air with their big scissors, and sewed with needles without thread. At last they announced, "The emperor's clothes are ready!"
Together with his courtiers, the emperor came. The swindlers lifted their arms as if they were holding something in their hands, and said, "These are the trousers. This is the robe, and here is the train. They are all as light as if they were made of spider webs. It will be as if Your Majesty had almost nothing on, but that is their special virtue."
"Oh yes," breathed all the courtiers; but they saw nothing, for there was nothing to be seen.
"Will your Imperial Majesty be so gracious as to take off your clothes?" asked the swindlers. "Over there, by the big mirror, we shall help you put your new clothes on."
The emperor did as he was told, and the swindlers acted as though they were dressing him in the clothes they should have made. Finally, they tied around his waist the long train which two of his most noble courtiers were to carry.
The emperor stood in front of the mirror, admiring the clothes he couldn't see.
"Oh, how they suit you! A perfect fit!" everyone exclaimed. "What colors! What patterns! The new clothes are magnificent!"
"The crimson canopy, under which your Imperial Majesty is to walk, is waiting outside," said the imperial master of court ceremony.
"Well, I am dressed. Aren't my clothes becoming?" The emperor turned around once more in front of the mirror, pretending to study his finery.
The two gentlemen of the imperial bedchamber fumbled on the floor, trying to find the train they were supposed to carry. They didn't dare admit that they didn't see anything, so they pretended to pick up the train and held their hands as if they were carrying it.
The emperor walked in the procession under his crimson canopy. And all of the people of the town who had lined the streets or were looking down from the windows, said that the emperor's new clothes were beautiful. "What a magnificent robe! And the train! How well the emperor's clothes suit him!"
None of them were willing to admit that they hadn't seen a thing; for if anyone did, then he was either stupid or unfit for the job he was in. Never before had the emperor's clothes been such a success.
"But he doesn't have anything on!" cried a little child.
"Listen to the innocent one," said the proud father. And the people whispered among each other and repeated what the child had said.
"He doesn't have anything on. There's a little child who says that he has nothing on."
"He has nothing on!" shouted all the people at last.
The emperor shivered, for he was certain that they were right; but he thought, "I must bear it until the procession is over." And he walked even more proudly, and the two gentlemen of the imperial bedchamber went on carrying the train that wasn't there.
tr. Erik Christian Haugaard
Hans Christian Andersen, The Complete Fairy Tales & Stories.
NY: Doubleday, 1974. pp. 77-81
WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?
Plato: For the greater good.
Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.
Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration,
as a chicken which has the daring and courage to
boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom
among them has the strength to contend with such a
paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the
princely chicken's dominion maintained.
Hippocrates: Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its
pancreas.
Jacques Derrida: Any number of contending discourses may be discovered
within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and
each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial
intent can never be discerned, because structuralism
is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!
Thomas de Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.
Timothy Leary: Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment
would let it take.
Douglas Adams: Forty-two.
Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road
gazes also across you.
Oliver North: National Security was at stake.
B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its
sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a
fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while
believing these actions to be of its own free will.
Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt
necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at
this historical juncture, and therefore
synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.
Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself,
the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The possibility of "crossing" was encoded into the
objects "chicken" and "road", and circumstances came
into being which caused the actualization of this
potential occurrence.
Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed
the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.
Aristotle: To actualize its potential.
Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-
nature.
Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing
events to grace the annals of history. An historic,
unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt
such an herculean achievement formerly relegated to
homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurence.
Salvador Dali: The Fish.
Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from
the trees.
Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.
Epicurus: For fun.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.
Johann von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.
Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.
Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken
was on, but it was moving very fast.
David Hume: Out of custom and habit.
Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it (censored) wanted to. That's the (censored)
reason.
Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?
Ronald Reagan: I forget.
John Sununu: The Air Force was only too happy to provide the
transportation, so quite understandably the chicken
availed himself of the opportunity.
The Sphinx: You tell me.
Mr. T: If you saw me coming you'd cross the road too!
Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow
out of life.
Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.
Molly Yard: It was a hen!
Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side.
Chaucer: So priketh hem nature in hir corages.
Wordsworth: To wander lonely as a cloud.
The Godfather: I didn't want its mother to see it like that.
Keats: Philosophy will clip a chicken's wings.
Blake: To see heaven in a wild fowl.
Othello: Jealousy.
Dr Johnson: Sir, had you known the Chicken for as long as I have,
you would not so readily enquire, but feel rather the
Need to resist such a public Display of your own
lamentable and incorrigible Ignorance.
Mrs Thatcher: This chicken's not for turning.
Supreme Soviet: There has never been a chicken in this photograph.
Oscar Wilde: Why, indeed? One's social engagements whilst in
town ought never expose one to such barbarous
inconvenience - although, perhaps, if one must cross a
road, one may do far worse than to cross it as the
chicken in question.
Kafka: Hardly the most urgent enquiry to make of a low-grade
insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a hen.
Swift: It is, of course, inevitable that such a loathsome,
filth-ridden and degraded creature as Man should assume
to question the actions of one in all respects his
superior.
Macbeth: To have turned back were as tedious as to go o'er.
Whitehead: Clearly, having fallen victim to the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness.
Freud: An die andere Seite zu kommen. (Much laughter)
Hamlet: That is not the question.
Donne: It crosseth for thee.
Pope: It was mimicking my Lord Hervey.
Constable: To get a better view.
The I Ching:
Because 9 in the first place means it furthers one to cross the Great Road. No blame.
Chuang-tse: If Confucius and Lao-tse are on opposite sides of the same road , how much more so then the chicken?
Adolf Hitler:
Because it was his racial destiny to expand his Chickensraum.
Herman Hesse:
When the bizarre and solitary chicken disappeared across the road, his landlady's nephew, who felt an odd kinship toward the clucking fowl, found an egg inside the pen she once inhabitted....
Sam Spade:
The chicken pleaded with Sam to let her go. She even tried to seduce him. But Sam sneered, "I won't play the sap for you." He had to clear himself from guilt, and no chicken would stand in his way. His smile widened as he gazed at the bird. "When they fry you, I'll always remember you, kid," he said.
Martin Luther King, Jr.. - I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross the road without having their motives called into question.
In any bar: because the chick is a sadistic pussy.
Once in a decade: because the chicken has stupid confidence.
