Sizzling and Running, Not Whistling and Erupting

One of Aesop's more enigmatic fables is about snails. A farmer's boy is gathering snails. When he has two hands full he lights a fire and throws them on, for he intends to eat them. The snails draw back inside their shells and begin to sizzle in the way snails do when heated. " You abandoned creatures!" cries the boy. " How can you whistle while your houses burn?"

What can be the moral of this story?

The farmer's boy learns nothing. The snails learn nothing, for presumably they are already dead when the farmer's boy asks his cruel and foolish question. So it must be we who are to learn something.

Last night Pliny and Nostradamus were at Pliny's mum's, watching a documentary about the last days of Pompeii. Pliny thought she heard a heard the sound of plumbing. She though it might be coming from next door. Five minutes later she could still hear it, in the quiet bits. "Can you hear something like running water?" she asked. Pliny's mum did not reply, because she only had one of her hearing aids in. Nostradamus said," It's probably the sound of the volcano." Pliny didn't think so. After all who would know better than Pliny what that sounds like? She got up and went into the bathroom, where she discovered that her mum had left the hot tap running. " It was the tap," she said, earning a certain amount of admiration and gratitude.

Now the moral of both these stories is, I think, the same: People think kindly of those who are able to identify the proper meaning of a sound.