Nick Klaus's Fables
Page 15
the store opened, he bought four books. They kept him busy for only a day and a half. He read with voracious appetite the whole week but still was not satisfied. Weeks went by, and his tiny room became too small to accommodate all the books he was reading. He found a bigger house on the edge of town. Five months went by. The house was crumbling under its own weight. Piles and piles of books stuffed the house. The monkey had to climb on top of columns and slipped through narrow tunnels to get to his bed. A week later, he was forced to sleep outside its front door for the books had taken all the space.
He decided to build an extension, which he quickly filled up with more books. “I’m smart and getting smarter” he said to the people passing by glancing curiously as he went back and forth pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with all kind of books. The more he read the more he added new rooms. Within a year, the house looked like a castle. There were so many rooms, so many stairs, that visitors could walk for hours an end without coming back to the same place.
One day as the monkey was reading, the room grew dark. He grabbed a candle but could find matches. He searched around, but too many books cluttered the room and blocked the windows. He moved them hoping to let the sunlight in, but the windows were so dusty by years of neglect. He opened one of them and noticed the lush and green landscape. His eyes were not used to such brightness. “I think I should go out and clean the windows,” he told himself. He headed towards the front door, but the castle had grown so vast that he was unable to find it. He walked and walked through the maze of rooms he had built over the years filled with all the knowledge in the world to find his way out, but no one in town ever saw the clever monkey again.
The Bee and the Fly (#40)