MIT Author: Samuel Jay Keyser HM
Opining on Life's Great Mysteries
Oscar Wilde was once asked why he wrote fairy tales for children and he answered, "I no more write for children than I write for adults. Rather, I write for those who find in simplicity a subtle strangeness." So, too, writes Samuel Jay Keyser HM in The Pond God and Other Stories (Front Street, 2003). Keyser, MIT's professor emeritus of linguistics and special assistant to the Chancellor, says "The stories in this volume were inspired by a Navajo shaman who once said that he had seen a god walking across the horizon. The horizon is not a place but a perspective. What happens there depends on who you are."
The Boston Globe said the book exists "somewhere between Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet and Aesop's Fables" and should appeal to children "old enough to want not only to be smart, but also wise."
MIT Professor Of Psychology Steven Pinker said, "What a wonderful collection of stories this is—haunting, charming, and wry, and written with a spare elegance." And MIT Linguistics Professor Noam Chomsky called the book "a captivating, thought-provoking, charming collection of delightful fables."
In addition to writing many scholarly works, Keyser is the author of a book of poems, Raising the Dead (Garden Street Press). The Pond God and Other Stories is his first book for children. The following two selections were taken from this collection.
1. The Pond God
Robert Shetterly illustration from The Pond God and Other Stories.
A young god could take any shape he wished.
Once he changed into a bee and stung the other gods.
Infuriated, they chased him across the horizon.
He changed into a lake, but the gods each took
a single mouthful and left him to be a pond forever.
Time passed. A forest grew. Through its trees
his watery eyes reflected the blue sky and the stars.
Dead leaves floated over his rippled forehead.
Clouds, slow in summer, faster in winter,
drifted across his cheeks, wrinkled by the wind.
Fish and frogs, lily pads and water snakes
grew inside his belly.
In winter, when they died, he was locked in grief.
In spring, when they thrived, tears of joy swelled in him.
A thousand years passed, and the gods, taking pity,
went to the pond and spat out their mouthfuls.
The pond became a lake but the god did not reappear.
Why do you not rejoin us? asked the gods.
Because, replied the lake, I am content not to.
And that is why contentment is not something one seeks
but something one finds.
2. How a God Lost Himself and Found Beauty
Once a god swallowed an acorn.
He had been sleeping beneath an oak when a lark began
to sing. The song was beautiful and he sat up to listen,
but the startled bird flew off, dislodging an acorn.
Come back, cried the god.
That was when he swallowed it.
The acorn took root.
The tree grew bigger until it pressed him to the earth,
and when its branches pierced his navel,
he could not move.
Another god said, I'll cut down your tree.
Then you will walk again.
If you kill the tree, the god replied,
I will die as well.
So he lay for ten thousand days,
until one morning a lark began to build a nest in his branches,
singing a song more beautiful than he had ever heard.
Now, when the lark sang,
the god kept the branches of his tree perfectly still.
And that is how a lark found peace
and a god surrendered to beauty.
Published 2003
