Life is a struggle. The prisoner struggles for freedom… The fight for freedom is a heroic struggle: when we wage it, it is a contest of heroes; when it is waged against us, we brand it rebellion. At the call to arms the man draws his sword and sets off to war. The women wisely stay at home and tear linen for bandages…
Man needs allies to reach his goals. In worldly skirmishes interest begets alliance; in better circles, values do. With a strong ally, goals are easily reached, but what holds for the true friend holds for the ideal ally too: a white raven, a black swan…
Perhaps the situation is familiar: to escape, or to succeed, one would forge an alliance even with the devil. Faust did so in the hope of knowledge.
It is good counsel from antiquity that, for as long as possible, the enemy should be kept within one's own camp, for then at least his every step is in view. If he is free, there is no knowing what he is scheming.
If we must roam half the world in search of a true ally, for an enemy we need not go far: we ourselves are right here. When our weaker self joins forces with our worse self, their success is assured – and so is the ruin of our better self. Armed with reason enough, however, even a forced or dangerous alliance can become useful.
Neither supper nor freedom…
The snake was a prisoner in the basket. On rare occasions its master would coax it out and with the sound of his pipe make it sway in a dance it had long since grown tired of. Often it lay huddled in the basket for days on end, with nothing much happening. It had grown weary of being charmed, and found its captivity ever harder to bear. It lay forever coiled in the basket that was its whole world, unable even to stretch out. Sometimes it felt the basket swing with it, and then it knew that its master was on the road, perhaps meaning to display his snake-charmer's craft in another village.
Today, too, began like all the others – in boredom. Suddenly, however, the lid of the basket was lifted and a terrified mouse was tossed in beside the snake. The snake is the natural enemy of the mouse, since the little rodent is the snake's fare. It felt that at last a splendid opportunity had presented itself. The little mouse trembled, frozen stiff, and the snake was on the point of lunging, but then it stopped to think: ‘Even if I devour the mouse, I still shall not get free, and freedom, after all, is worth more than a belly stuffed just once!’ So it decided that the cleverest course was to make peace with the mouse and ask it to gnaw a hole in the basket, so that both of them could crawl out. The mouse agreed to the alliance; what else could it have done? If it stayed here with the snake, that meant certain death; if they joined forces, it would at least gain time. The snake is a scheming creature, and its intention was to wait until the little mouse had gnawed through the basket, then gobble up the mouse and slip out through the hole into the free world. ‘For the sake of a common goal, even enemies sometimes join forces…’ – now it was the snake that charmed the little mouse. This is called the snake-and-mouse strategy.
But the little mouse was clever: it charmed the snake in turn, and dawdled over its work until the snake's attention flagged; what is more, it began to gnaw the tiniest of holes, one it could slip through itself, though the hefty snake hardly could. When it was done, the nimble little mouse, thinking no more of the snake's treacherous alliance, scampered off, and the reptile was left high and dry – neither supper nor freedom…
Life is a struggle. The prisoner struggles for freedom, the free man for perfection…