In Saxe’s retelling, a gathering of blind men struggles to understand an elephant, each touching a single part of the great creature, unable to perceive the animal in its totality-thus, none of the blind men can entirely perceive the elephant, each too-content with their limited perception. Although versions of the story have appeared across more than a millennium, Saxe’s riff on the ancient parable took as its starting point his era’s often contentious debate over the existence of God, given the rise of the new sciences that challenged and even revoked deeply-held beliefs about the Christian God. Originally published in 1872 in the pages of Harper’s, a popular New York City magazine, John Godfrey Saxe’s “The Blind Men and the Elephant” upcycled a Buddhist parable from five centuries before the birth of Christ.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |