There is an allegorical short story written by H.G. Wells entitled The Apple. Several men in a “third-class carriage on a Sussex railway,” each absorbed in his own thoughts, begin to talk among themselves. One announces that he is in possession of what he calls an “apple from the Tree of Knowledge,” and that he “must get rid of it.”
I recall reading somewhere that both Archimedes and the mathematician Leonhard Euler never liked to explain how they arrived at their discoveries. They took care to remove all the scaffolding before presenting their magnificent edifices to posterity; we saw the finished product, but not the arduous labor that was necessary to create it. This may be an exaggeration, at least in the case of Archimedes, whose lost Method was finally unearthed in Istanbul in 1906; but I think the point is sufficiently true, for enough famous names, to merit some reflection.
There are times to act decisively, times to observe events and await opportunities, and times to discuss. There are also times to say nothing at all. Aesop tells a story to make this point. A monkey, he says, was once taken as a shipboard pet by a Grecian sailor. When the sailor’s vessel approached Attica’s Cape Sounion, a storm arose and the ship capsized; all aboard ship were tossed into the sea, but a dolphin appeared and prevented the monkey from drowning.
Aesop tells us a story of a hunter who was once looking for the tracks of a lion. Searching here and there with no success, he paused to ask a local woodcutter if he had seen the footprints of a lion, and, if so, where he thought the lion’s den might be found. The woodcutter responded that there was no need to bother with prints; he would be happy to take the hunter to the lion’s den himself. Instead of being pleased at this news, the hunter began to show signs of extreme nervousness and fear. He then extricated himself from the situation, telling the woodcutter, “Thank you for your offer, but I am really only interested in finding the tracks of the lion, not the lion himself.”
There is a fable in Aesop that involves the behavior of the beaver. In ancient times, beavers were often hunted for the scented oil, known as castorea, that was found in sacs near its genital area. The beaver liked to rub its hind parts against trees and logs, thereby possessively marking them with his scent; and this scent apparently had to humans a pleasant aroma, reputed to be evocative of vanilla. The ancients mistakenly thought that this valued aromatic came from the beaver’s scrotum, rather than from special internal sacs adjacent to the genitalia.
We discuss two fables from Aesop that illustrate the point that we ourselves must take action, and not expect deities to come to our aid. When all is said and done, we must see ourselves as the architects of our own destinies.
Can a man change, or are his personality traits so fixed that external circumstances are incapable of adjusting them in any significant way? This is a question that finds enthusiastic advocates for both answers. The cynics–or as they prefer to be called, the “realists”–tell us that personality does not change. Our knowledge contracts and expands, but the core of our being remains immutable. We may become more polished in our presentations, or more adept at concealing our intentions, but in the end it is still the same old “us.” We are here, and we have not changed.
Quintus Curtius 
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