Ambrose Bierce - Cobwebs from an Empty Skull

Some of the lower animals held a convention to settle for ever the unspeakably important question, What is Life?

"Life," squeaked the poet, blinking and folding his filmy wings, "is-." His kind having been already very numerously heard from upon the subject, he was choked off.

"Life," said the scientist, in a voice smothered by the earth he was throwing up into small hills, "is the harmonious action of heterogeneous but related faculties, operating in accordance with certain natural laws."

"Ah!" chattered the lover, "but that thawt of thing is vewy gweat blith in the thothiety of one'th thweetheart." And curling his tail about a branch, he swung himself heavenward and had a spasm.

"It is vita !" grunted the sententious scholar, pausing in his mastication of a Chaldaic root.

"It is a thistle," brayed the warrior: "very nice thing to take!"

"Life, my friends," croaked the philosopher from his hollow tree, dropping the lids over his cattish eyes, "is a disease. We are all symptoms."

"Pooh!" ejaculated the physician, uncoiling and springing his rattle. "How then does it happen that when we remove the symptoms, the disease is gone?"

"I would give something to know that," replied the philosopher, musingly; "but I suspect that in most cases the inflammation remains, and is intensified."

Draw your own moral inference, "in your own jugs."

A heedless boy having flung a pebble in the direction of a basking lizard, that reptile's tail disengaged itself, and flew some distance away. One of the properties of a lizard's camp-follower is to leave the main body at the slightest intimation of danger.

"There goes that vexatious narrative again," exclaimed the lizard, pettishly; "I never had such a tail in my life! Its restless tendency to divorce upon insufficient grounds is enough to harrow the reptilian soul! Now," he continued, backing up to the fugitive part, "perhaps you will be good enough to resume your connection with the parent establishment."

No sooner was the splice effected, than an astronomer passing that way casually remarked to a friend that he had just sighted a comet. Supposing itself menaced, the timorous member again sprang away, coming down plump before the horny nose of a sparrow. Here its career terminated.

We sometimes escape from an imaginary danger, only to find some real persecutor has a little bill against us.

A jackal who had pursued a deer all day with unflagging industry, was about to seize him, when an earthquake, which was doing a little civil engineering in that part of the country, opened a broad chasm between him and his prey.

"Now, here," said he, "is a distinct interference with the laws of nature. But if we are to tolerate miracles, there is an end of all progress."

So speaking, he endeavoured to cross the abyss at two jumps. His fate would serve the purpose of an impressive warning if it might be clearly ascertained; but the earth having immediately pinched together again, the research of the moral investigator is baffled.

"Ah!" sighed a three-legged stool, "if I had only been a quadruped, I should have been happy as the day is long-which, on the twenty-first of June, would be considerable felicity for a stool."

"Ha! look at me!" said a toadstool; "consider my superior privation, and be content with your comparatively happy lot."

"I don't discern," replied the first, "how the contemplation of unipedal misery tends to alleviate tripedal wretchedness."

"You don't, eh!" sneered the toadstool. "You mean, do you, to fly in the face of all the moral and social philosophers?"

"Not unless some benefactor of his race shall impel me."

"H'm! I think Zambri the Parsee is the man for that kindly office, my dear."

This final fable teaches that he is.

FOOL.-I have a question for you.

PHILOSOPHER.-I have a number of them for myself. Do you happen to have heard that a fool can ask more questions in a breath than a philosopher can answer in a life?

F.-I happen to have heard that in such a case the one is as great a fool as the other.

PH.-Then there is no distinction between folly and philosophy?

F.-Don't lay the flattering unction to your soul. The province of folly is to ask unanswerable questions. It is the function of philosophy to answer them.

PH.-Admirable fool!

F.-Am I? Pray tell me the meaning of "a fool."

PH.-Commonly he has none.

F.-I mean-

PH.-Then in this case he has one.

F.-I lick thy boots! But what does Solomon indicate by the word fool? That is what I mean.

PH.-Let us then congratulate Solomon upon the agreement between the views of you two. However, I twig your intent: he means a wicked sinner; and of all forms of folly there is none so great as wicked sinning. For goodness is, in the end, more conducive to personal happiness-which is the sole aim of man.

F.-Hath virtue no better excuse than this?

PH.-Possibly; philosophy is not omniscience.

F.-Instructed I sit at thy feet!

PH.-Unwilling to instruct, I stand on my head.

FOOL.-You say personal happiness is the sole aim of man.

PHILOSOPHER.-Then it is.

F.-But this is much disputed.

PH.-There is much personal happiness in disputation.

F.-Socrates-

PH.-Hold! I detest foreigners.

F.-Wisdom, they say, is of no country.

PH.-Of none that I have seen.

FOOL.-Let us return to our subject-the sole aim of mankind. Crack me these nuts. (1) The man, never weary of well-doing, who endures a life of privation for the good of his fellow-creatures?

PHILOSOPHER.-Does he feel remorse in so doing? or does the rascal rather like it?

F.-(2) He, then, who, famishing himself, parts his loaf with a beggar?

PH.-There are people who prefer benevolence to bread.

F.-Ah! De gustibus -

PH.-Shut up!

F.-Well, (3) how of him who goes joyfully to martyrdom?

PH.-He goes joyfully.

F.-And yet-

PH.-Did you ever converse with a good man going to the stake?

F.-I never saw a good man going to the stake.

PH.-Unhappy pupil! you were born some centuries too early.

FOOL.-You say you detest foreigners. Why?

PHILOSOPHER.-Because I am human.

F.-But so are they.

PH.-Excellent fool! I thank thee for the better reason.

PHILOSOPHER.-I have been thinking of the pocopo .

FOOL.-Is it open to the public?

PH.-The pocopo is a small animal of North America, chiefly remarkable for singularity of diet. It subsists solely upon a single article of food.

F.-What is that?

PH.-Other pocopos. Unable to obtain this, their natural sustenance, a great number of pocopos die annually of starvation. Their death leaves fewer mouths to feed, and by consequence their race is rapidly multiplying.

F.-From whom had you this?

PH.-A professor of political economy.

F.-I bend in reverence! What made you think of the pocopo?

PH.-Speaking of man.

F.-If you did not wish to think of the pocopo, and speaking of man would make you think of it, you would not speak of man, would you?

PH.-Certainly not.

F.-Why not?

PH.-I do not know.

F.-Excellent philosopher!

FOOL.-I have attentively considered your teachings. They may be full of wisdom; they are certainly out of taste.

PHILOSOPHER.-Whose taste?

F.-Why, that of people of culture.

PH.-Do any of these people chance to have a taste for intoxication, tobacco, hard hats, false hair, the nude ballet, and over-feeding?