Time to take a break for a moment, to rest the mind, to amuse it with a different kind of choice. Time to play "The Lady or the Tiger."
As follows:
Once upon a time in a barbaric kingdom, a young man attempted to win the love of the king's daughter — a grave offense. The king decreed that, as punishment, the young man must stand in a great arena facing two doors.
Behind the first door is a beautiful young woman of the court. If the young man opens that door, he must marry the woman immediately.
Behind the second door is a ferocious tiger.
The young man looks up at the princess, who is in the stands beside her father. She surreptitiously and urgently signals the young man to choose the door on the right. He does so. He opens the door....
Here is the riddle: Did the barbaric princess urge her lover to choose the door leading to marriage to a beautiful young woman of whom the princess was already jealous? Or did she direct him to choose the tiger, and his own death?
Frank Stockton, the writer who propounded this question in the 1880s, left the answer to his readers. He intended it to be a test of character. Stockton said that the choice you make shows the kind of person you are.
I ran across the puzzle the other day in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s new memoir, "A Life in the Twentieth Century." Schlesinger says that the game of The Lady or the Tiger became widely popular when Stockton proposed it more than a century ago. The poet Robert Browning announced that he "had no hesitation in supposing that such a princess under such circumstances would direct her lover to the tiger's door."
The pessimist/cynic opts for the tiger, I suppose. The optimist/romantic votes for the lady. I have a sappy, soap opera kind of mind, I regret to report. I decided immediately that the princess would have done the sweet and selfless thing, and, like Rick Blaine sending Ilsa Lund off with Victor Lazlo on the Lisbon plane at the end of "Casablanca," would have sacrificed her own happiness, swallowed her regret, and withdrawn in a fog of nobility.
There's something more astringently satisfying in the tiger option. Either way, it's a pretty primal choice, if you think about it — an annihilating ferocity of ego version a gesture of self-abnegation that approaches a religious dimension.
The fable has an elusive allegorical force: What's it mean, exactly? Allegory craves application.
Let me think about the story. A young man competes for a prize for which he is not worthy: He aspires to be a prince, and hence, ultimately, a king. He is found out, and is to be punished for it. Here, the action switches to the heart and mind of the princess (who was the prize): In the princess, a primitive ferocity of ego competes against the generous impulse of self-abnegation...
I'd be mildly curious to know how Al Gore and George W. Bush would react as readers of the fable. Would they say the princess directed the young man to happiness with the lady, or to death with the tiger?
It might be more to the point to imagine that Gore or Bush was in the stands, standing beside the king. If that were the case, would Princess Al make a choice motivated by destructive ferocity of ego, or by self-sacrifice? How about Princess George?