onward! humanites

Just before my nephew was born, I went over to Dublin for my sister-in-law's baby shower. Part of the party (for which I was mostly wrecked on whiskey sours) was an empty book that was passed around, into which all present had to write a message to Felix (who was of course at the time both nameless and genderless) that he could read when he was older. I contributed two pages: One was Superbunny, a cartoon character I invented when I was eight or nine and sporadically write new episodes of; the other was a fable I'd heard when I was too young to remember how old I was:

A long time ago there was a King who, bored one day, decided to put a riddle to his court: He declared that he would renounce his kingdom and give it up to whoever could bring him a gift that would make him sad when he was happy, and happy when he was sad. He knew he would not lose his kingdom, for the riddle had no answer- he just wanted to be amused by what his courtiers bought to him.

As he predicted, many came and went, but none answered the riddle. Until one day, a beggar came to court, bearing a small brass ring, which he handed to the King. The King examined the ring, handed his crown and sceptre to the beggar, and wordlessly left his kingdom to walk the earth forever.

Inscribed on the ring were the words Gam zeh ya'avor.

'This too shall pass'

But now I'm thinking I should have written this, which I made up a few minutes ago:

Two men are lost in the desert- they've been walking for days and are dying of thirst.

One of the men sees a pool of brackish water, and starts running towards it. The other remembers hearing that unexplained pools of free-standing water found in this particular desert are usually highly contaminated and not potable. His friend is almost at the pool, so he yells out to say that the water could be poisonous.

His friend is far too thirsty to listen, or care, and stumbles into the pool and drinks greedily, washing his hands and face with the fetid fluid. He lies on back in the water, sated, with a huge grin on his face, his thirst temporarily sated. The second man wants very much to drink, but does not. He spends the night rubbing the back of the man who drank the water, who spends it vomiting, soiling himself, and generally in agony.

In the morning the man who drank from the pool awakens, horribly parched after a night of fluid loss and dehydration. He starts to drag himself towards the pool for some water. His friend wakes up and sees what he is about to do, grabs him and forces him away from the pool.

"What are you doing?!?" he asks in desperation: "Don't you remember what happened last night?"

"Yes," the man who drank from the pool answers, "but please... I'm so very thirsty."

or maybe this, which I came across last night whilst reading the remarkable novel Infinite Jest:

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually leap from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring to fall; it's the terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling "Don't!" and "Hang on!", can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

I think they'd both end up being a lot more useful to him.