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The Ant and the Grasshopper
A famous short story
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About the author
W. Somerset Maugham
2,099 books6,043 followersWilliam Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style.
His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays.
Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.
During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service . He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965.
At the time of Maugham's birth, French law was such that all foreign boys born in France became liable for conscription. Thus, Maugham was born within the Embassy, legally recognized as UK territory.
His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays.
Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.
During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service . He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965.
At the time of Maugham's birth, French law was such that all foreign boys born in France became liable for conscription. Thus, Maugham was born within the Embassy, legally recognized as UK territory.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
November 22, 2020
3,5*
Somerset Maugham a dar uma nova roupagem e mais graça a uma história tradicionalmente moralista, com aquele olhar sardónico que o caracteriza.
"Era encantador e sem escrúpulos. Nunca conheci ninguém a quem fosse mais difícil recusar um empréstimo. Assim, tinha um rendimento certo assegurado, pago pelos amigos, e com que facilidade ele fazia amigos. Mas dizia sempre que era uma maçada gastar dinheiro em necessidades; o dinheiro que dava prazer em gastar era o que era gasto em luxos."
Somerset Maugham a dar uma nova roupagem e mais graça a uma história tradicionalmente moralista, com aquele olhar sardónico que o caracteriza.
"Era encantador e sem escrúpulos. Nunca conheci ninguém a quem fosse mais difícil recusar um empréstimo. Assim, tinha um rendimento certo assegurado, pago pelos amigos, e com que facilidade ele fazia amigos. Mas dizia sempre que era uma maçada gastar dinheiro em necessidades; o dinheiro que dava prazer em gastar era o que era gasto em luxos."
January 26, 2025
The Mooch.
There's always a black sheep in the family, and Tom Ramsay has been the thorn on the side of his brother George all his life. Always living off his family and friends, always broke and in trouble. But luck can only get you so far, and poor George fears the dreadful day his brother Tom might get his comeuppance.
Nice! A re-imagination of "The Ant and the Grasshopper" fable by La Fontaine, with a little devious twist. You can always count on good ol' Somerset Maugham to deliver a solid shortie with fine class and style. Like Graham Greene, I'm particularly fond of this type of classicness; almost never great, but always good enough to deliver something unique and memorable, in their way. Looking forward to encountering more of his stories, or reading some of his novels, long overdue by now. Recommendable.
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PERSONAL NOTE :
[1938] [6p] [Classics] [3.5] [Recommendable] ["Life isn't fair"]
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★★★★☆ The Verger.
★★★☆☆ The Ant and the Grasshopper. [3.5]
-----------------------------------------------
La Sanguijuela.
Siempre hay una oveja negra en la familia, y Tom Ramsay ha sido la espina clavada en el costado de su hermano George toda su vida. Siempre viviendo de su familia y amigos, siempre arruinado y en problemas. Pero la suerte sólo puede llevarte hasta cierto punto, y el pobre George teme el terrible día en que su hermano Tom reciba su merecido.
Interesante! Una reimaginación de la fábula "La hormiga y el saltamontes" de La Fontaine, con un pequeño y perspicaz giro de trama. Siempre se puede contar con el buen Somerset Maugham para entregarte un sólido corto con excelente clase y estilo. Al igual que con Graham Greene, disfruto especialmente este tipo de clasicismo; casi nunca espectacular, pero siempre lo suficientemente bueno como para ofrecer algo único y memorable, a su manera. Con ganas de encontrarme con más de sus historias, o leer algunas de sus novelas, algo que ya me debo desde hace mucho tiempo. Recomendable.
-----------------------------------------------
NOTA PERSONAL :
[1938] [6p] [Clásicos] [3.5] [Recomendable] ["La vida no es justa"]
-----------------------------------------------
There's always a black sheep in the family, and Tom Ramsay has been the thorn on the side of his brother George all his life. Always living off his family and friends, always broke and in trouble. But luck can only get you so far, and poor George fears the dreadful day his brother Tom might get his comeuppance.
Nice! A re-imagination of "The Ant and the Grasshopper" fable by La Fontaine, with a little devious twist. You can always count on good ol' Somerset Maugham to deliver a solid shortie with fine class and style. Like Graham Greene, I'm particularly fond of this type of classicness; almost never great, but always good enough to deliver something unique and memorable, in their way. Looking forward to encountering more of his stories, or reading some of his novels, long overdue by now. Recommendable.
-----------------------------------------------
PERSONAL NOTE :
[1938] [6p] [Classics] [3.5] [Recommendable] ["Life isn't fair"]
-----------------------------------------------
★★★★☆ The Verger.
★★★☆☆ The Ant and the Grasshopper. [3.5]
-----------------------------------------------
La Sanguijuela.
Siempre hay una oveja negra en la familia, y Tom Ramsay ha sido la espina clavada en el costado de su hermano George toda su vida. Siempre viviendo de su familia y amigos, siempre arruinado y en problemas. Pero la suerte sólo puede llevarte hasta cierto punto, y el pobre George teme el terrible día en que su hermano Tom reciba su merecido.
Interesante! Una reimaginación de la fábula "La hormiga y el saltamontes" de La Fontaine, con un pequeño y perspicaz giro de trama. Siempre se puede contar con el buen Somerset Maugham para entregarte un sólido corto con excelente clase y estilo. Al igual que con Graham Greene, disfruto especialmente este tipo de clasicismo; casi nunca espectacular, pero siempre lo suficientemente bueno como para ofrecer algo único y memorable, a su manera. Con ganas de encontrarme con más de sus historias, o leer algunas de sus novelas, algo que ya me debo desde hace mucho tiempo. Recomendable.
-----------------------------------------------
NOTA PERSONAL :
[1938] [6p] [Clásicos] [3.5] [Recomendable] ["La vida no es justa"]
-----------------------------------------------
July 1, 2020
Amusing !
July 3, 2021
An upbeat, crisply written re-telling of the parable of the Ant and the Grasshopper.
January 29, 2023
It read like a spoof of the original fable. There lies the hilarity. To retain the title and then say a story of two humans at odds with each other is quite a trick and he seems to have used it to amuse himself. Unfortunately this story too sounds like a fairy tale, perhaps a counter fairy tale. Like all fairy tales, this too was enjoyable but definitely not relatable. It was a purely fun read. I laughed my guts out along with the narrator.
November 3, 2025
I’m binge reviewing my best-read short stories of all time.
There’s something deliciously cruel about Maugham’s sense of irony, and nowhere does it sparkle quite as mischievously as in “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” On the surface, it’s a simple inversion of Aesop’s fable — the hardworking ant ends up bitter and broke, while the careless grasshopper, all charm and chaos, stumbles into fortune. However, Maugham, ever the surgical observer of human comedy, isn’t merely mocking morality; he’s revealing how morality itself is a social performance that rarely pays off. The story’s humour works like a scalpel dipped in champagne — effervescent, cutting, and a little too real.
At its center are two brothers, George and Tom Ramsay, archetypes as cleanly drawn as a parable and yet as psychologically knotty as any modern study in resentment. George is the respectable one: industrious, proper, polite, and a pillar of his bourgeois world. Tom is his opposite: a libertine, a debtor, and a connoisseur of pleasure and improvisation. If George embodies the Protestant work ethic, Tom embodies the Jazz Age’s improvisational nihilism — the belief that life is to be danced through, not endured.
The brilliance of Maugham’s structure lies in its conversational intimacy. The narrator, with that perfect tone of urbane detachment, recounts the family gossip with the practiced indifference of a man sipping tea over someone else’s misfortune. The style is anecdotal, but beneath the anecdote lies a silent explosion — the realization that life obeys no moral arithmetic. Maugham’s prose, light as meringue, carries the weight of existential unfairness.
Tom, the eternal grasshopper, has spent his life running from creditors, seducing married women, and avoiding the tiresome burden of responsibility. He is, by all social metrics, a failure — and yet, by the story’s end, he wins. Not just materially, but cosmically. He marries a rich widow, inherits her fortune, and strolls past his bitter, respectable brother with the kind of effortless grace that money instantly sanctifies. Maugham gives us that last image like a slap disguised as a smile — George, fuming, humiliated, muttering about justice while Tom drives away in a Rolls-Royce.
This is the kind of story that feels tailor-made for the postmodern reader, who already suspects that the moral order is a scam. In Maugham’s world, effort doesn’t correlate with reward, and virtue is its own punishment. What makes the story brilliant is not the twist but the tone — that playful refusal to resolve the moral dissonance. It’s as if Maugham is saying: “Yes, the wicked prosper. Yes, the good suffer. And? What else did you expect?”
The laughter that follows isn’t lighthearted; it’s metaphysical. Maugham uses comedy as a delivery system for despair. Like all true humourists — from Wilde to Kafka — he recognizes that jokes about morality only work if the universe itself is laughing too. The real subject of “The Ant and the Grasshopper” is not Tom’s good luck or George’s bad one, but the human need to believe that the universe is fair. George’s misery isn’t economic; it’s existential. He cannot bear the idea that decency is meaningless. His resentment is a form of metaphysical heartbreak.
There’s a modernity to Maugham’s cruelty. In the Victorian moral order, success was supposed to crown virtue, and downfall was proof of sin. Maugham, writing in the interwar years, dismantles that illusion with one elegant anecdote. He shows that success is arbitrary, that charm often trumps conscience, and that life, far from being a moral ledger, is a casino where the house always wins — and the house is chaos itself.
Tom Ramsay, seen through today’s lens, feels oddly prophetic. He’s the influencer before social media, the man who thrives by performing charm and converting personality into capital. He’s proof that charisma, when properly monetized, can redeem any sin. George, on the other hand, is the modern corporate worker — grinding, disciplined, faithful to rules that no longer reward faithfulness. The story becomes, inadvertently, an allegory for the twenty-first century’s collapse of meritocracy.
And yet, there’s tenderness beneath the irony. Maugham doesn’t condemn Tom; he envies him, perhaps even admires his refusal to participate in the collective delusion of toil. There’s something liberating in Tom’s amorality — a joyous defiance of all that’s dull, dutiful, and dead. When he wins, we feel the sting of injustice, yes, but also the thrill of rebellion. Maugham leaves us torn between schadenfreude and secret approval. After all, who among us hasn’t fantasized about being the grasshopper who dances his way into good fortune while the ants toil and fume?
Stylistically, the story is a masterclass in compression. Maugham distills entire social philosophies into dialogue and anecdote, never once breaking his poker-faced calm. The sentences glide with that Maughamian clarity — simple, conversational, almost journalistic. Yet every word is balanced on irony. The charm is deliberate; it mirrors Tom’s own surface — breezy, effortless, and hiding a deep, cynical wisdom.
There’s also something distinctly English about the flavour of its cruelty. The entire moral tragedy is filtered through social decorum — tea tables, polite gossip, and drawing-room judgments. The stakes are emotional, but the tone remains arch. It’s what gives Maugham’s moral inversions their sting. He never moralizes; he simply arranges events and lets propriety hang itself with its own etiquette.
The ending, of course, is what seals the story’s brilliance. Tom’s triumph isn’t presented as justice or injustice — it simply *is*. Life goes on. The narrator smiles. George seethes. And the world, as ever, refuses to make sense. That refusal is what makes the story feel modern, even now. In a world obsessed with fairness, Maugham quietly reminds us that fairness is a human invention, and the universe didn’t sign the contract.
Postmodern readers might see in “The Ant and the Grasshopper” a proto-deconstruction of fable — the dismantling of moral teleology through irony. But Maugham, I think, wasn’t writing for theory; he was writing for survival. He knew that life was too absurd to moralize about, and too funny not to. His genius lies in his ability to observe injustice not with rage, but with amused clarity. The humour doesn’t soften the blow — it sharpens it.
By the end, we find ourselves laughing — not because it’s funny, but because it’s true. The story leaves a residue of unease, a recognition that our moral narratives are merely comfort blankets we wrap around randomness. Tom’s success feels wrong, but it also feels inevitable. That inevitability is Maugham’s real punchline.
So we laugh, a little bitterly, knowing that somewhere out there, another Tom Ramsay is being toasted at another dinner party, while another George fumes into his whisky. Maugham doesn’t ask us to take sides; he invites us to see the comedy in the futility of choosing. And in that laughter, as dry and cold as gin, he gives us not consolation but something better — perspective.
In the end, “The Ant and the Grasshopper” is less a moral fable than a mirror held up to our faith in moral fables. It’s Maugham’s quiet, elegant way of saying: the world doesn’t reward virtue, but it does occasionally reward wit. And perhaps that, in the long run, is the only justice there is.
Give it a go. One of the greatest short stories of all time!!
There’s something deliciously cruel about Maugham’s sense of irony, and nowhere does it sparkle quite as mischievously as in “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” On the surface, it’s a simple inversion of Aesop’s fable — the hardworking ant ends up bitter and broke, while the careless grasshopper, all charm and chaos, stumbles into fortune. However, Maugham, ever the surgical observer of human comedy, isn’t merely mocking morality; he’s revealing how morality itself is a social performance that rarely pays off. The story’s humour works like a scalpel dipped in champagne — effervescent, cutting, and a little too real.
At its center are two brothers, George and Tom Ramsay, archetypes as cleanly drawn as a parable and yet as psychologically knotty as any modern study in resentment. George is the respectable one: industrious, proper, polite, and a pillar of his bourgeois world. Tom is his opposite: a libertine, a debtor, and a connoisseur of pleasure and improvisation. If George embodies the Protestant work ethic, Tom embodies the Jazz Age’s improvisational nihilism — the belief that life is to be danced through, not endured.
The brilliance of Maugham’s structure lies in its conversational intimacy. The narrator, with that perfect tone of urbane detachment, recounts the family gossip with the practiced indifference of a man sipping tea over someone else’s misfortune. The style is anecdotal, but beneath the anecdote lies a silent explosion — the realization that life obeys no moral arithmetic. Maugham’s prose, light as meringue, carries the weight of existential unfairness.
Tom, the eternal grasshopper, has spent his life running from creditors, seducing married women, and avoiding the tiresome burden of responsibility. He is, by all social metrics, a failure — and yet, by the story’s end, he wins. Not just materially, but cosmically. He marries a rich widow, inherits her fortune, and strolls past his bitter, respectable brother with the kind of effortless grace that money instantly sanctifies. Maugham gives us that last image like a slap disguised as a smile — George, fuming, humiliated, muttering about justice while Tom drives away in a Rolls-Royce.
This is the kind of story that feels tailor-made for the postmodern reader, who already suspects that the moral order is a scam. In Maugham’s world, effort doesn’t correlate with reward, and virtue is its own punishment. What makes the story brilliant is not the twist but the tone — that playful refusal to resolve the moral dissonance. It’s as if Maugham is saying: “Yes, the wicked prosper. Yes, the good suffer. And? What else did you expect?”
The laughter that follows isn’t lighthearted; it’s metaphysical. Maugham uses comedy as a delivery system for despair. Like all true humourists — from Wilde to Kafka — he recognizes that jokes about morality only work if the universe itself is laughing too. The real subject of “The Ant and the Grasshopper” is not Tom’s good luck or George’s bad one, but the human need to believe that the universe is fair. George’s misery isn’t economic; it’s existential. He cannot bear the idea that decency is meaningless. His resentment is a form of metaphysical heartbreak.
There’s a modernity to Maugham’s cruelty. In the Victorian moral order, success was supposed to crown virtue, and downfall was proof of sin. Maugham, writing in the interwar years, dismantles that illusion with one elegant anecdote. He shows that success is arbitrary, that charm often trumps conscience, and that life, far from being a moral ledger, is a casino where the house always wins — and the house is chaos itself.
Tom Ramsay, seen through today’s lens, feels oddly prophetic. He’s the influencer before social media, the man who thrives by performing charm and converting personality into capital. He’s proof that charisma, when properly monetized, can redeem any sin. George, on the other hand, is the modern corporate worker — grinding, disciplined, faithful to rules that no longer reward faithfulness. The story becomes, inadvertently, an allegory for the twenty-first century’s collapse of meritocracy.
And yet, there’s tenderness beneath the irony. Maugham doesn’t condemn Tom; he envies him, perhaps even admires his refusal to participate in the collective delusion of toil. There’s something liberating in Tom’s amorality — a joyous defiance of all that’s dull, dutiful, and dead. When he wins, we feel the sting of injustice, yes, but also the thrill of rebellion. Maugham leaves us torn between schadenfreude and secret approval. After all, who among us hasn’t fantasized about being the grasshopper who dances his way into good fortune while the ants toil and fume?
Stylistically, the story is a masterclass in compression. Maugham distills entire social philosophies into dialogue and anecdote, never once breaking his poker-faced calm. The sentences glide with that Maughamian clarity — simple, conversational, almost journalistic. Yet every word is balanced on irony. The charm is deliberate; it mirrors Tom’s own surface — breezy, effortless, and hiding a deep, cynical wisdom.
There’s also something distinctly English about the flavour of its cruelty. The entire moral tragedy is filtered through social decorum — tea tables, polite gossip, and drawing-room judgments. The stakes are emotional, but the tone remains arch. It’s what gives Maugham’s moral inversions their sting. He never moralizes; he simply arranges events and lets propriety hang itself with its own etiquette.
The ending, of course, is what seals the story’s brilliance. Tom’s triumph isn’t presented as justice or injustice — it simply *is*. Life goes on. The narrator smiles. George seethes. And the world, as ever, refuses to make sense. That refusal is what makes the story feel modern, even now. In a world obsessed with fairness, Maugham quietly reminds us that fairness is a human invention, and the universe didn’t sign the contract.
Postmodern readers might see in “The Ant and the Grasshopper” a proto-deconstruction of fable — the dismantling of moral teleology through irony. But Maugham, I think, wasn’t writing for theory; he was writing for survival. He knew that life was too absurd to moralize about, and too funny not to. His genius lies in his ability to observe injustice not with rage, but with amused clarity. The humour doesn’t soften the blow — it sharpens it.
By the end, we find ourselves laughing — not because it’s funny, but because it’s true. The story leaves a residue of unease, a recognition that our moral narratives are merely comfort blankets we wrap around randomness. Tom’s success feels wrong, but it also feels inevitable. That inevitability is Maugham’s real punchline.
So we laugh, a little bitterly, knowing that somewhere out there, another Tom Ramsay is being toasted at another dinner party, while another George fumes into his whisky. Maugham doesn’t ask us to take sides; he invites us to see the comedy in the futility of choosing. And in that laughter, as dry and cold as gin, he gives us not consolation but something better — perspective.
In the end, “The Ant and the Grasshopper” is less a moral fable than a mirror held up to our faith in moral fables. It’s Maugham’s quiet, elegant way of saying: the world doesn’t reward virtue, but it does occasionally reward wit. And perhaps that, in the long run, is the only justice there is.
Give it a go. One of the greatest short stories of all time!!
December 22, 2020
It's basically a story with a moral of - Life isn't fair, people don't always get what they deserve.
You can put it into a lot of situations:
Work hard doesn't equal money, comfortable lifestyle. Being faithful and loving won't guarantee a lifelong happy relationship, committing a crime doesn't have to lead you to prison, just like being lawful won't necessarily make you avoid it.
It's depressing, and unfortunately most of us will end up like George who's an ant.
There's no justice, life is pointless.
Don't read it if you're feeling low.
You can put it into a lot of situations:
Work hard doesn't equal money, comfortable lifestyle. Being faithful and loving won't guarantee a lifelong happy relationship, committing a crime doesn't have to lead you to prison, just like being lawful won't necessarily make you avoid it.
It's depressing, and unfortunately most of us will end up like George who's an ant.
There's no justice, life is pointless.
Don't read it if you're feeling low.
August 7, 2025
The Ant and The Grasshopper by Somerset Maugham – another look at this short story is here https://realini.blogspot.com/2014/05/...
10 out of 10
‘My sympathies were with the grasshopper and for some time I never saw an ant without putting my foot on it…’ this is what Somerset Maugham says, under the guise of the narrator of the tale, and if we disagree with the cruelty, we may feel the same about the moral of the fable which praises the ant at the expense of the grasshopper
The take from Aesop https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... would be that the ant is working hard, assuring it has provisions for winter, while the grasshopper is only singing, enjoying himself and not doing anything about the future, he is not concerned, but he will suffer because of it
As in most cases, we need moderation, albeit in the Somerset Maugham re-telling, the grasshopper wins – spoiler alert – in the shape and form of Tom Ramsay, while his brother, George Ramsay, has the role of the ant in the modern take on the old fable, Tom decides to enjoy life, and ignore the pressure of family, society
You can read the story at https://englishliterature.net/william... Tom spends freely, and when he has no more, he borrows – Carpe Diem appears to be his mantra, the guiding principle, and there is a lot to say about that, praising the attitude, while being cautious about excesses
One of the best books you can read on happiness, to decide if you go with the ant or the grasshopper, is The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky, where you find ‘Happiness Activity No 9: Savoring Life’s Joys-paying close attention, taking delight in life’s momentary pleasures and wonders, through thinking, writing, drawing or sharing with another’
Which seems to be a vote for the grasshopper https://realini.blogspot.com/2014/07/... in that we need to savor, then there is Flow, and we can also learn from Tolstoy, who said something like the most important moment is now, the most important person is the one in front of you…
Nevertheless, for me, The Golden Mean of Aristotle https://realini.blogspot.com/2014/07/... applies best here, and in most situations, for he places virtue in the middle, on both sides of it, you have excess, bravery is not being crazy and driving on ice with 200km per hour, or sitting home, to void all peril
Fyodor Dostoyevsky weighs in on these issues, for he had been sentenced to death, and was facing the execution squad, with only three minutes left to live, which he wanted to use for saying goodbye to family and friends, pass his life in front of him, and admire a ray of sunshine, falling on a steeple nearby, a cross on top of a church
Alhamdulillah, the great thinker was saved, or the czar had had in mind only to scare him, and he lived to tell the story https://realini.blogspot.com/2021/01/... we find this experience, of facing death, looking at the last days on earth, in the magnum opera of the wonderful Fyodor Dostoyevsky
He is the proof that we have despicable Russians, Stalin, Putin, and others, and the fabulous Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and so many more, mathematically, whenever you have a large enough group of people, you find the terrible, the average, and the incredibly disgusting…Trump is another example
The best scenario would be to combine the ant and the grasshopper, that is to find your calling, and engage in the activity you like anyway, and make that your job and use the formula offered by Harvard Professor Tal Ben-Shahar, who taught the most popular courses in the history of that most prestigious institution
There is a group of activities that you like, another group of the things you are good at, and a third of the tasks that have meaning for you, and where they overlap you have to look for the secret of happiness, you could be paid to do what you would choose anyway, there is nothing better than being the Grasshopper and The Ant
That would be Flow https://realini.blogspot.com/2016/10/... a classic of positive psychology by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, co-founder of positive psychology, who has taken to studying what brings people to The Zone, and it is not sitting on a couch, watching television, being a lazy bum
It is in fact when we are challenged that we feel joy, the conditions of Flow are – this is an autotelic activity, nothing else matters, you are focused, concentrated, control is assured, there are well defined, meaningful goals, time is relative, the experience of a ballerina, a surgeon could be used as examples of expansion, or compression
A brain surgeon walks out of a major operation and he says let us have lunch, only to be told that it is time for dinner, what he thought were a few hours, tuned into twice as much, at the same time, a ballerina comes on stage, and the minute she dances there, pirouetting, feel like many hours for her, just like Einstein said
‘Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute…” you also have constant, instant feedback, and then the challenges meet skills in order to achieve Flow
Now for my standard closing of the note with a question, and invitation – maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u... – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the befits from it, other than the exercise per se
There is also the small matter of working for AT&T – this huge company asked me to be its Representative for Romania and Bulgaria, on the Calling Card side, which meant sailing into the Black Sea wo meet the US Navy ships, travelling to Sofia, a lot of activity, using my mother’s two bedrooms flat as office and warehouse, all for the grand total of $250, raised after a lot of persuasion to the staggering $400…with retirement ahead, there are no benefits, nothing…it is a longer story, but if you can help get the mastodont to pay some dues, or have an idea how it can happen, let me know
As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/r...
Some favorite quotes from To The Hermitage and other works
‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’
‚Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus’
“From Monty Python - The Meaning of Life...Well, it's nothing very special...Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”
10 out of 10
‘My sympathies were with the grasshopper and for some time I never saw an ant without putting my foot on it…’ this is what Somerset Maugham says, under the guise of the narrator of the tale, and if we disagree with the cruelty, we may feel the same about the moral of the fable which praises the ant at the expense of the grasshopper
The take from Aesop https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... would be that the ant is working hard, assuring it has provisions for winter, while the grasshopper is only singing, enjoying himself and not doing anything about the future, he is not concerned, but he will suffer because of it
As in most cases, we need moderation, albeit in the Somerset Maugham re-telling, the grasshopper wins – spoiler alert – in the shape and form of Tom Ramsay, while his brother, George Ramsay, has the role of the ant in the modern take on the old fable, Tom decides to enjoy life, and ignore the pressure of family, society
You can read the story at https://englishliterature.net/william... Tom spends freely, and when he has no more, he borrows – Carpe Diem appears to be his mantra, the guiding principle, and there is a lot to say about that, praising the attitude, while being cautious about excesses
One of the best books you can read on happiness, to decide if you go with the ant or the grasshopper, is The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky, where you find ‘Happiness Activity No 9: Savoring Life’s Joys-paying close attention, taking delight in life’s momentary pleasures and wonders, through thinking, writing, drawing or sharing with another’
Which seems to be a vote for the grasshopper https://realini.blogspot.com/2014/07/... in that we need to savor, then there is Flow, and we can also learn from Tolstoy, who said something like the most important moment is now, the most important person is the one in front of you…
Nevertheless, for me, The Golden Mean of Aristotle https://realini.blogspot.com/2014/07/... applies best here, and in most situations, for he places virtue in the middle, on both sides of it, you have excess, bravery is not being crazy and driving on ice with 200km per hour, or sitting home, to void all peril
Fyodor Dostoyevsky weighs in on these issues, for he had been sentenced to death, and was facing the execution squad, with only three minutes left to live, which he wanted to use for saying goodbye to family and friends, pass his life in front of him, and admire a ray of sunshine, falling on a steeple nearby, a cross on top of a church
Alhamdulillah, the great thinker was saved, or the czar had had in mind only to scare him, and he lived to tell the story https://realini.blogspot.com/2021/01/... we find this experience, of facing death, looking at the last days on earth, in the magnum opera of the wonderful Fyodor Dostoyevsky
He is the proof that we have despicable Russians, Stalin, Putin, and others, and the fabulous Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and so many more, mathematically, whenever you have a large enough group of people, you find the terrible, the average, and the incredibly disgusting…Trump is another example
The best scenario would be to combine the ant and the grasshopper, that is to find your calling, and engage in the activity you like anyway, and make that your job and use the formula offered by Harvard Professor Tal Ben-Shahar, who taught the most popular courses in the history of that most prestigious institution
There is a group of activities that you like, another group of the things you are good at, and a third of the tasks that have meaning for you, and where they overlap you have to look for the secret of happiness, you could be paid to do what you would choose anyway, there is nothing better than being the Grasshopper and The Ant
That would be Flow https://realini.blogspot.com/2016/10/... a classic of positive psychology by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, co-founder of positive psychology, who has taken to studying what brings people to The Zone, and it is not sitting on a couch, watching television, being a lazy bum
It is in fact when we are challenged that we feel joy, the conditions of Flow are – this is an autotelic activity, nothing else matters, you are focused, concentrated, control is assured, there are well defined, meaningful goals, time is relative, the experience of a ballerina, a surgeon could be used as examples of expansion, or compression
A brain surgeon walks out of a major operation and he says let us have lunch, only to be told that it is time for dinner, what he thought were a few hours, tuned into twice as much, at the same time, a ballerina comes on stage, and the minute she dances there, pirouetting, feel like many hours for her, just like Einstein said
‘Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute…” you also have constant, instant feedback, and then the challenges meet skills in order to achieve Flow
Now for my standard closing of the note with a question, and invitation – maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u... – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the befits from it, other than the exercise per se
There is also the small matter of working for AT&T – this huge company asked me to be its Representative for Romania and Bulgaria, on the Calling Card side, which meant sailing into the Black Sea wo meet the US Navy ships, travelling to Sofia, a lot of activity, using my mother’s two bedrooms flat as office and warehouse, all for the grand total of $250, raised after a lot of persuasion to the staggering $400…with retirement ahead, there are no benefits, nothing…it is a longer story, but if you can help get the mastodont to pay some dues, or have an idea how it can happen, let me know
As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/r...
Some favorite quotes from To The Hermitage and other works
‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’
‚Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus’
“From Monty Python - The Meaning of Life...Well, it's nothing very special...Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”
June 16, 2019
William Somerset Maugham began the short story "The Ant and the Grasshopper" by using the same name in the fable of La Fontaine. According to this fable, the ant worked hard during the summer preparing shelter and food for the winter. The grasshopper, however, was singing the whole summer and when the winter came, he asked the ant for food, to which the ant answered: "You sang. Why, then go and dance."
The author described in the story the life of two brothers: George and Tom. Tom was a careless person. He spent his life at parties and gambling, borrowed money without aim to return it. Society did not approve of his lifestyle. Though he was forty–six he looked as young as thirty–five. George was only a year older than his carefree brother and he looked sixty. He always did what was to be done, worked hard, saved money for his retirement.
What happened in the story and the author's opinion about the moral of the fable in real circumstances ... readers will know about it after reading this funny short story.
Here is the link to the text of the story:
https://lingualeo.com/ru/jungle/the-a...
The author described in the story the life of two brothers: George and Tom. Tom was a careless person. He spent his life at parties and gambling, borrowed money without aim to return it. Society did not approve of his lifestyle. Though he was forty–six he looked as young as thirty–five. George was only a year older than his carefree brother and he looked sixty. He always did what was to be done, worked hard, saved money for his retirement.
What happened in the story and the author's opinion about the moral of the fable in real circumstances ... readers will know about it after reading this funny short story.
Here is the link to the text of the story:
https://lingualeo.com/ru/jungle/the-a...
February 9, 2022
I personally do not envy tom in the slightest because I'd get a lot of anxiety from that sort of instability. It's a bit depressing/bittersweet really, but I'm glad I read it. It's only about a 3min audio on youtube, but the characters maugham painted made me reflect a lot on real life scenarios I've been in and real life people I've come across. I'd recommend it to virtually anyone.
January 22, 2018
Lol. Life isn't fair.
Read by Kenneth Danziger
Read by Kenneth Danziger
February 17, 2022
Not a fan of this story.
September 8, 2022
3,5⭐čitala za skolu....
July 7, 2016
From the author of "The Razor's Edge." Rambling and pointless... or I just didn't get it :)
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