A Little Fable

I believe that "A Little Fable" is in the public domain.  If I am in error on this I will remove it immediately.

A Little Fable, by Franz Kafka.

""Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day.  At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up."

When I was in college, there was a student there, a very free-spirited girl, who had a reputation for never missing a party.  She was friendly, never met a stranger, and everyone liked her.  Then, one day, she disappeared.

Eventually, her body was found and her murder was linked to a serial killer after one of his victims was able to escape.

Everyone was talking about the case.  When the idea was advanced that the girl contributed to her own murder by the situations in which she placed herself, one person became incensed.  "You're saying that she deserved to be raped and murdered!"  Others insisted that no, she did not deserve to be raped and murdered, but she did place herself into dangerous situations which she could have avoided if she had chosen to do so.

We sometimes create our own boxes, our own mazes, our own traps, our own prisons.  There is an old Southern saying (I've "cleaned it up" for this blog), "If you walk in the sewer, you will get sewage on your shoes."

We all make many choices and each choice we make in a particular direction, good or bad, makes it easier to make the next choice in the same direction.  It also makes it less likely that we will turn around and go back the way we came. (Remember our old friend, μετάνοιά/repentance, from the 9 February 2011 post?)

Each bad choice we make can limit our future choices and we can paint ourselves into a corner.  This is an American idiom which calls to mind the image of a man with a can of red paint who begins painting the floor as soon as he enters a room.  When he reaches the far corner of the room, the only way out is to walk back across the wet red paint.

The foolish mouse in "A Little Fable" made poor choices, increasingly boxing itself into one particular direction.  When it finally realized its error, it turned around, and there was the cat.