Ten Tributes to Calvino by Rhys Hughes Read Free Book Online Page A

but I can feel pity for a sentient entity that clearly has no chance of survival without assistance. So it was my moral duty to help. It can’t honestly be asserted that I looked forward to enjoying the company of this fabular foundling when it recovered.
    For I am a loner, a misanthrope; and yes, misanthropy can apply to the creations and products of the human race as well as to the race itself. The fable is an artform I regard with distaste, a maudlin package of words that constitutes an item of propaganda. They have often been used to facilitate repression and stasis by advising those who read them to be satisfied with the existing state of affairs, to be submissive.
    It is in the interests of the ruling classes, the rich and powerful elite, to foster among the poor the idea that we should all be satisfied with our lot in life, that to strive for change is catastrophic. Most fables encourage this reactionary notion: they warn the underprivileged masses to remain meek and unthreatening. They aren’t just harmless little tales but dampeners of ambition, metaphoric blows against progress.
    In theory, a wise man shouldn’t help an injured fable.
    But I am no revolutionary and I care not what regimes humans devise to make their own miserable lives even worse, provided I’m not included in a census of victims. Nonetheless I am an organic being with feelings, a recluse but not one with etiolated emotions; and I vowed to do my best to look after the feverish fable. I put him to bed, kept him warm, sang songs of soothing serenity while he softly slumbered.
    Two weeks later, he was better. He sat at the breakfast table with me. I munched my overdone toast, spread thickly with apricot jam, and slurped my sweet black coffee and nodded politely at him and said, “Well now. It still remains to be decided what to do next with you. I have explained that you can’t stay here indefinitely. I value my privacy and seclusion and you have already managed to disrupt my routine.”
    “Thank you for saving my life, Mr Excelsior!” he replied.
    I quietly acknowledged his gratitude.
    “But I want you to leave this afternoon,” I added.
    “I have no wish to be a burden, sir!”
    We remained silent for several minutes, but there was no awkwardness in the hiatus. I don’t think he expected or even hoped I would change my mind; indeed, he seemed rather anxious to be on his way, but not because he was the roving type, like a rumour, wandering from ear to ear, brain to brain, never pinned to the printed page. On the contrary, he had a mission to get himself lodged in a book. I realised that.
    A homeless fable, it occurred to me, wasn’t a real fable, any more than an approximation is a fact. On some deep thematic level he had a burning urge to secure a place in an appropriate text, to insert himself into a tome where he might flourish and reach his full potential; and it seemed I ought to aid him in this quest also. Otherwise the charity I had already expended on him would be wasted, for he would wither.
    “Very well,” I said briskly. “We must find you a proper home.”
    “Thank you kindly, Mr Excelsior.”
    “The logical place to search is in my library.”
    And that’s where we went, when my final slice of toast was gone and the jam spoon licked as clean as a table’s soul. There was a shelf of dusty volumes that were mostly collections of fables. Like a protective father, I held hands with the fable as I knocked on the spine of the first title in the line of bound books. Most of them hadn’t been consulted for decades and were cobwebbed with spiders’ domiciles.
    A voice rasped, “Yes? Who is there? What do you want?”
    “Do you have any room for a lost fable?”
    “Are you playing a joke?”
    “Absolutely not! It’s a simple question.”
    “But don’t you know who I am? I’m a definitive selection of Aesop’s fables, the most historically prestigious of all such collections! Scholars have ratified my entire contents