Word: aesop
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Even before Aesop, wise men were illustrating points about human nature with parables about dogs, foxes, geese, snakes, rats, oysters, cocks and bulls. All literature, from the Bible to the comic books, is full of zoomorphic comment on human behavior. Seldom have these comparisons given serious offense, one exception being the case of Aesop himself, who was killed, partly because of his fables, by a Delphian mob. Last week Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson knew just how Aesop felt...
...Tail. Admittedly, most La Fontaine precepts are as sound as Ben Franklin's-e.g., "Better think of the outcome before you begin," "A counterfeit's sure to be exposed to light"-although they are dressed in brocade rather than homespun. The fables he borrowed from Aesop in La Fontaine's hands became tart and graceful satires on society, with neat plots and sharp blackout punch lines...
...Love. Nowadays Vinoba Bhave reads only three books: Euclid's Elements, Aesop's Fables and the Bhagavad Gita. For him, as for Gandhi, the Bhagavad Gita is the supreme book of human guidance. This great Sanskrit poem, imbedded in a larger work called the Mahabharata, is later than the Vedas and the Upanishads, and fills a role in the Hindu holy books something like that of the New Testament in the Bible. During one of his jail terms, Vinoba lectured every Sunday on the Gita. He translated it into Marathi* verse, and this work sold about a quarter...
...proper study of mankind may be man, but writers from Aesop to George Orwell have found animals just as handy. Latest to study mankind by animal roundabout is French-born Novelist Raoul Faure, 43, a resident of California since 1941, who uses lizards for his parable, The Cave and the Rock...
During the war years, Laughton was restless. He tried to lose himself in his collection of art (Renoir, Cezanne, Utrillo), and in organizing classical jam sessions. Then he began dropping into U.S. Army hospitals, where he read aloud from Charles Dickens, James Thurber, Aesop, Thomas Wolfe, the Bible. Says Laughton: "The men in the hospital, unlike the people in the theaters, when they didn't understand said so out loud and if I didn't understand either I learned to admit it . . . And when I did understand and they did not, I knew I wasn't doing...