Stories From The Old Attic - Robert Harris (ebook reader 8 inch .TXT) 📗

the young man returned to town, he quickly discovered that his social life was now pretty much a historical artifact. Whenever he went to a party, the reaction was always the same.

“What’s wrong with him?” some girl would ask.

“He’s gotta look that way until someone marries him,” would come the reply.

“Hasn’t that plot already been done?” the girl would say, walking off in another direction.

But, hey, this is a fairy tale and I’m in a good mood so let’s say that finally, after many rejections, the young man found a nice girl who actually loved him as he was.

As the young man got to know her, he kept trying to imagine what she looked like. After awhile, he constructed a picture of her in his mind, so that whenever he looked in her direction, his imagined vision of her came before his eyes so vividly that he felt he could almost see her. He thought that he could very nearly see the slight curve of her lips, the sunlight shining in her hair, the expressions of delight or concern on her brow.

Well, anyway, things worked out so well that pretty soon the girl’s father was mortgaging his house to pay for the wedding.

When the bride and groom awoke on the first day of their honeymoon, the young man discovered that his eyes had been opened. However, he also discovered that the girl lying beside him did not have the deep blue eyes with long eyelashes, or the upturned nose with little freckles of the girl he had been seeing in his mind. The young man, still in the habit of blurting out his first impression, said, “Gosh, you’ve changed.”

“No,” said his new wife. “The only thing that’s changed is that now you can see. Oh, and you no longer have a bump on your nose.”

“But where’s your blonde hair?” the young man asked.

“My hair has always been this color,” the girl said, fingering her chestnut tresses.

“But you look so different,” the young man said, still confused.

“When you looked at me before,” the girl explained, “you saw only your imagination. This is what I’m really like.”

“I see,” said the young man, as he embraced her and began to give her a thousand kisses.

“I know,” she said.

 

A Traditional Story

Once upon a time, several time zones from your house, there lived a king who had tons of money, mansions and castles on too many lots, plenty of art and cultural treasures, dozens of wives (some of whom loved him), and so much power that the mere mention of his name caused cardiac arrest among a considerable number of his subjects. But—he was not happy. So he called his advisors to him to seek their advice.

“My soul troubles me,” he told his court. “I have seemingly a full life, but I do not find happiness here. In the middle of an amusement, or when I wake at night, or as I take a bite of rare and delicious food, I feel an overcast sky in my heart. Help me to dispel this cloud.”

“Perhaps your majesty would be happy if he had more wealth,” suggested his treasurer. So the king increased the taxes on his people, hired traders to go to distant lands to buy and sell, told his workers to redouble their efforts in his precious metals mines and minted more coins than ever. It wasn’t long before the king had so many storehouses full of treasure that he couldn’t even count them.

On many an occasion his majesty would be riding through a city and see a huge building he didn’t recognize, and upon inquiry, discover that it was yet one more warehouse full of his loot. And let me tell you, these warehouses were so glutted with gold and jewels and coins and rich carpets and Old Master paintings and antique vases that when the king wanted to look inside one, the jewels would flow out the door like gravel and the coins would spill out like water. His servants got so tired of replacing the excess that they finally just began to shovel it into the trash can after the king left. (Of course, they probably helped themselves to a little bit of it, too.)

In his palaces, the king had so much fancy stuff that ancient statues were used as door props in the stables, thousand-year-old urns were used as spittoons in the kitchen, and scraps of precious carpets were used to clean the servants’ boots. The point is that after all this additional acquisition, the king’s lifestyle was much fancier, but the king himself was still not happy.

“What his majesty needs is activity,” said the king’s culture minister. “Activity is the rubbing paper that scours the rust from the soul and burnishes her to a new shine. If the king would just engage in some hobbies, he would find contentment.” So the king took up some hobbies: hunting, painting, dancing, building (more mansions and castles), eating, woodworking, stamp collecting, riding (in his golden carriage and on horseback), swimming (in his pool full of pearls), and even knitting. In all he tried thousands or perhaps hundreds of activities, each of them dozens of times.

He also held athletic contests, built amusement parks, and ransacked the world for jugglers and magicians and singers and players and storytellers (that’s how I met him) and musicians. He ate too much, drank too much, and danced and played and watched and traveled and did too much and basically engaged in a constant frenzy of activity from morning to night, from January to December, from the beginning of the decade to its end. And the result was that he was amused for awhile, but was mostly fat and tired and sometimes drunk and often disoriented, but still not happy.

“Perhaps your majesty would be happy if he ruled the surrounding lands and felt secure from attack,” suggested the head of his army. “For the proverb says, ‘In security lies happiness.’” So his majesty instructed his generals to go forth and conquer the territories around him. After a preposterous quantity of noise, smoke, blood, guts, and dying, the king found himself in possession of jillions of acres of farms and towns and houses and cottages and the souls of all those who lived therein. He now ruled over the land as far as he—or even someone with good eyesight—could see in every direction from the top of his highest tower. At any time of day or night the king could call for the relief of a distressed friend or the beheading of an enemy. He had absolute say over the life or death, the happiness or suffering, of millions of people of every rank and degree, from the most exalted noble in a seaside mansion to the most unfortunate street urchin in a grimy and stifling hovel. Such a thought sometimes gave the king half a smile, but he was still not happy.

“Perhaps what the king needs is love,” said the eunuch in charge of the king’s harem. “If he would marry a new variety of ever more beautiful wives, he would perchance find happiness among them.” So the king decided to realize this scenario in three dimensions and searched throughout his kingdom for the most desirable women he could find. He found pretty ones and witty ones and laughing ones and moody ones and smart ones and elegant ones and plain ones and philosophical ones and decorated ones—women of every proportion, size, color, personality, and talent, and he married a hundred of them, some of whom loved him even more than those among the first few dozen he was already married to. And the king found much pleasure in his wives, but he was still not truly happy.

“The king will find happiness only in wisdom,” said one of the king’s scholars. “For it is written that ‘truth is a joy unto itself.’” So the king applied himself to books of wisdom, and to seeking the knowledge of all his many scholars and sending throughout all his realm to find the wise from every land. Dozens came and dozens pretended to instruct him in wisdom or in the way to happiness, but while he found some really good advice and some satisfying rules for life, happiness still eluded him.

Then one day came a woman from a land beyond the sunrise. Her words were few but they so affected those who listened that she was immediately granted an audience with the king, who explained the discontent of his condition.

“Here before me,” he said, “it would seem that I have everything a man could want. I have three or four rings on every finger, I can caress a beautiful woman’s hair in any color, I can ride a week in any direction and find my statue erected and feared, and I can hear any melody or see any play at my command. I possess or can do or enjoy everything I can imagine, and everything that the most creative of my servants can imagine. And yet I find that happiness is nowhere to be found. I am always rankled by a feeling of dissatisfaction and haunted by an awareness of emptiness.”

“Truly, his majesty’s desires seem to be infinite,” said one of his courtiers, scarcely more able to hide his disgust than his envy.

“His majesty’s desires are indeed infinite,” said the woman. “For that is the nature of the human heart. The heart’s deepest desires cannot be satisfied by any finite thing.”

“Then what am I to do?” asked the king with dismay.

“You must seek the Infinite,” the woman said.

“And where can I find it?” he asked. “What form does it take?”

“The Infinite is not a thing or in a particular place,” said the woman. “But seek Him and you will find happiness.”

When the people saw that the woman was returning to her land, they asked what she had said to the king.

“She reminded us of what we had forgotten,” said one of the king’s scholars, “that we are but travelers through an ephemeral landscape, and that on a journey through a desert, we should not expect to find happiness from fingering the grains of sand in the dunes. We find happiness by finding our way home.”

 

The Day Creativity Met the Linear Dragon

It was a winter’s rainy day when the new Vice President for Design Concepts (who had just been promoted from Senior Accountant because he could calculate to the nearest nickel how much a new car would cost to build) noticed that two of his employees, a young man and a young woman, were not at their desks. Upon inquiring, he was told that they had “gone to the loft to be creative.” The Vice President (who could remember the part number of every component he had ever touched) calmly adjusted his bow tie, cleared his throat, checked to see that his shoelaces were still tied, and then strode briskly down the long corridor of the half-remodeled automobile factory. Soon he was walking up the stairs to the loft, only to arrive at a door marked, “Do Not Disturb.”

Viewing the sign as an affront to his authority, he applied Chapter Two of the assertiveness training book he had just finished and quickly opened the door with determination and a scowl.

What he saw was not what he expected. Near the door was a boom box, playing very lively but not overly loud classical music. Directly in front of him across the room he saw the young woman, barefoot and wearing, instead of her business attire, purple sweatpants and a torn green sweatshirt. Worse than this, she was turning cartwheels and saying what sounded to him like, “Put it in the lake, dip it, water proof it, French dip it, soak it, drench