This was one of my final papers for my Humanities class and I just thought that I would put it up here to see what everyone thought. I was supposed to write about my world view of something like wisdom or love using an allegory.
Once there was a boy named Sophis. On any sunny day, Sophis could be found playing in the woods near his home. As he was playing one day, hitting his wooden sword against every tree he saw, he saw in the distance a hollow in the wood that was darkened by tall trees. His parents had always told him that he should never enter into dark parts of the forest, but he could hear other children laughing and shouting to him from inside the hollow. “Come play with us!” they said. “Come into the hollow to play!”
Sophis hesitated, remembering what his parents had told him. After a moment though, the boy rushed into the hollow, ready to play with the other children. He could hear delightful laughter all around him, along with the noise of other wooden swords hitting trees. All of a sudden though, Sophis found that he could not move. He was stuck in a large spider’s web, and the laughter turned into hissing and the sounds of wooden swords turned into terrible clicking noises.
Sophis struggled and shouted, listening as the enormous spiders drew nearer and nearer to him. Suddenly out of the darkness came a lantern. A man was carrying it, with an axe in his other hand. The man rushed up to Sophis, and he realized that this man was his father. Great relief overcame him as his father quickly cut him down from the web, dropped the axe to pick him up, and then ran. That night at the dinner table, Sophis and his family had a long discussion about what had happened. Sophis promised that he would never again enter into the dark hollow.
Years passed and every sunny day Sophis would go into the woods to play. Every year he would go by that hollow and every year he would hear the laughing and the sounds of children playing. He knew the truth though; if he went into the hollow to play with the children then the giant spiders would devour him, for his father had told him that they were of enormous size.
Ten years after his father had saved him, Sophis once again went into the woods. He did not go in to play this time, for over the years he had become a mighty hunter and he would go out into the woods to hunt deer and rabbits. This day, Sophis was fortunate, for he found a large buck grazing in a beautiful meadow. After shooting it with his bow, Sophis walked into the meadow and began to skin and clean the deer.
As he was going about his work he saw a large spider on the edge of the meadow, watching him work. Leaping up, the boy put an arrow to his bow and was ready to shoot when it said, “Please boy, I mean you no harm. I was not yet alive when you became trapped in my father’s web and we have no quarrel.” The boy kept his weapon ready, for his father had told him that the spiders were cunning and would say anything to convince him to go into their hollow. “Then if we have no quarrel,” said he, “leave me at once and I will not shoot.”
The spider left, but came back the next time he went hunting. The boy did and said the exact same thing, and the spider left every time. A week later, it happened again, but this time the boy was curious. “Why do you watch me when I am cleaning my deer and rabbits?” The spider replied, “It is because I have been thrown out of the hollow, and I am lonely all day. It is good to have some company.” Sophis felt sorry for the spider and asked it if it was hungry, he had always been taught to help the unfortunate. The spider said yes, so Sophis divided the deer and gave half to the spider. “Thank you,” said the spider. “Now you must go though, to feed your own family.”
So Sophis left to feed his own family. For three years he followed the same pattern. He would shoot an animal every day, give half to the lonely spider, then he would go home and give half to his family. When he was asked why he always brought home only half, he told them that he was helping a friend in need. Sophis knew that his father would not approve of him helping the spider, but he felt that it would be selfish of him not to.
After three years, the boy shot a deer and went to the meadow to meet the spider. As he was nearing the meadow, he gave out a cry of shock – he was stuck in a web. His friend the spider was crawling towards him on the web, only one thing was different. He was much larger than he had been when they had first met, for every time Sophis had fed him, he had grown. “Why have you spun this web?” Sophis said. “Are we not friends who have shared food together? Don’t we have no quarrel?” “Yes,” said the spider, “We have no quarrel, but I am hungry. I have grown large and strong and, if I eat you, I will be allowed back into the hollow. I am a spider Sophis. This was my plan all along.”
Lunging across the web, the spider ate Sophis and then scuttled away back to the hollow. When his parents could not find him the next day, or the next, they knew that the worst had happened and had a funeral for him.
Sophis was eaten because he lacked wisdom. He had been told by his parents not to trust spiders and spiders had even tried to eat him when he was younger. He had refused to learn from his experiences and the experiences of others. This is Leonardo da Vinci’s take on wisdom in a nutshell: Wisdom is the daughter of experience. In other words, all wisdom stems from experience.
In Plato’s written work The Apology, he speaks of how Socrates learned about how to be wise. In the allegory the Oracle at Delphi tells Socrates, who does not believe himself to be wise, that he in fact is wise. Socrates then goes out amongst of the publicly claimed wise people and questions them about their wisdom. He soon finds out that all of them say they know more than they really do, and that none of them are wise at all.
In the story of Sophis and the spider, Sophis believes himself to be wiser than his parents. They told him that the spiders were cunning and evil, but Sophis decided to befriend one anyway and got eaten because of it. This teaches us that one of the main attributes of wisdom is humility: realizing that you don’t know much about anything at all. Wisdom is obtained through your own experience, but also through the experience of others. If Sophis had submitted to the wisdom of his father, or even to the wisdom that his previous experiences had given him, then he may have shot the spider on site and then may have lived a long, happy life.
Works Cited
“Wisdom”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. Jan. 8 2007.
Web. Dec. 1 2010.
“Leonardo da Vinci Quotes”. Finest Quotes. http://www.finestquotes.com. N/A. Web. Dec. 1
2010.
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