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Excerpt
The Princess has walked into the forest on a cool May afternoon and is sitting on the stone rim of the well. She is dressed casually -- for a princess -- in one of her favorite walking outfits: a wide-sleeved low-necked short-ruffed fuchsia velvet bodice covering an eggshell-colored silk chemise, and a long forest-green velvet skirt over three stiff petticoats (no farthingale). Her long black hair, uncapped today and unpowdered, hangs down almost to her waist, as loosely as a bride's. She is wearing no makeup but a touch of eyeliner around her dark brown eyes and a dab of blush on her alabaster cheeks, no jewelry but a pair of small gold earrings and her second-best crown, of a thread-thin gold filigree so tactful that you would barely notice it. In her right hand she is holding her golden ball, which seems as bright and beautiful as her own independence. She gazes past the distorted reflection of her face, into its depths.
Since the Princess is earlier than usual, the Frog has not yet surfaced to see if she has come. The Frog sits in the mud at the bottom of the well, breathing through his skin. His nostrils are closed. He is in deep meditation. The water feels cold but comfortable. There is a small eddy near the surface; or is it near the surface of his mind? He sits motionless, silent except for an occasional, inconsequential croak.
Neither the Frog nor the Princess has any inkling of how utterly their lives are about to change.
We are now poised on the brink of events, the fulcrum of the story: the fulcrum of the universe. And what a pleasure it is to be here! How I love the beginnings of things: the first glint of dawn, the blank page, the vastness in an infant's eyes, all those shimmering moments when life is filled with pure possibility, and one would do anything -- almost anything -- to prolong the wonder of it. Verweile doch, du bist so schön! "O moment, you are so beautiful, stay with me a while longer," as Faust said in another context.
But the Princess is about to lose hold of her golden ball, and our story as a result is about to roll over the edge of becoming. This is the crucial moment.
All right. Let us stop now and focus our attention on the Princess's right hand. Up to this moment, she has been holding the golden ball, as she contemplates it, in the middle of her palm, with a grip neither too loose nor too firm. Her hand has been alert all through its nerves and fibers, alive with awareness, a concentration of her entire body. Up to this moment. And now, suddenly, the hand forgets itself. It grows limp. Its fingers uncurl. The golden ball totters, rolls half an inch backward, half an inch forward, pauses for an instant, then rolls down the ramp of her three middle fingers, over the edge of the fingertips, through two feet of air and into the well, with a loud, peremptory splash.
How could this have happened?
A star falls through the sky and we make a wish. To us it seems that the star is falling. But to the inhabitants of the star, the star is going neither down nor up but is stationary in a sky that proceeds along its ordinary course on a day like any other. Up and down are, after all, relative in the world of physics, and in the world of the soul they are often one and the same. What we are tempted to call a disaster is sometimes the first, painful stage of a blessing.
A rare and gifted person at the height of a soul-crisis can see that there is an intelligence that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will. And though on ordinary days we may persist in clinging to our own agendas, though we may think we know what is good for us and keep trying to make it happen, what we want is not necessarily what we deeply need. Some presence inside us knows better. That presence is the author of apparent disasters.
This can be stated from a slightly different perspective: Character is fate. Even though we are passionately attached, as personalities, to the stasis of our ordinary discontents, sometimes the critical moment arrives when on a deeper level we are ready for the world to fall apart. At such moments a disaster is precisely what we (unconsciously) long for.
The Princess comes to herself. A brief fibrillation thrills through the nerves of her empty hand. She sees the splash. She bursts into sobs.
The Frog in Love
The Frog, as I have told you, was sitting at the bottom of the well. What I have not yet told you is that he was in love.
This was a very meditative frog. Ever since he could remember, he had spent most of his life simply observing his breath as he sat in the high grass or under the old linden tree or in the mud at the bottom of the well. There were forays from time to time, of course, when he would surface to catch a few dozen flies with a tongue that shot out and back from the floor of his mouth like a long, flexible, sticky-pointed arrow. One did have to live, after all, and although he took no pleasure in killing, he was an animal among animals. But however necessary his hunting expeditions were, they seemed like diversions. He much preferred to be watching his breath, diving deep through the waters of his own serenity.
Three months before the beginning of our story, this almost uninterrupted calm had been . . . shattered is too violent a word, and inaccurate besides. It is not as if his calm were a plate-glass window through which life had thrown a large rock. No, let us say roiled. His calm had been roiled. There was now a continual source of agitation, excitement, and longing in the waters of his mind. He had seen the Princess.
Why this hadn't happened before, we can only guess. The Princess had been coming to the well for many years. The Frog had lived there for as long as he could remember. It is true that he usually emerged at night, but there was many an afternoon hour that he spent sitting in meditation on the well's rim or under the linden tree, motionless except for the occasional flick of his tongue. Had she never come there except when he was underwater? Or had he always been so absorbed that he simply hadn't noticed her?
He did notice her this time. It felt as if a bolt of energy had flashed through his eyes and electrified his whole body. It was a physical sensation, but the shock itself was not physical. It was a shock of understanding. He knew, beyond a doubt, that he and the Princess were meant for each other.
This had nothing to do with the fact that she was beautiful. Many things were beautiful. Light was beautiful, and mud, and the tall bending grass, and the sky on a cloudy day, and the quick green-and-gold flies that buzzed through his sleepy gaze on a summer afternoon, and the shadowed underside of a leaf on the surface of the well, and water itself: water was perhaps the most beautiful thing of all. It was not her beauty that touched him so deeply. It was something else in her, or perhaps it was not in her but in the electrified space between them. Whatever that something was, it made him want to draw closer to her. A frog and a woman? A frog and a princess no less? He realized how unnatural this desire to be near her was. He didn't know how to approach her. But somehow, he knew, they would be together, they had to be together, in an intimacy that was deeper than he had ever dived.
During the next three months, the Frog spent many hours meditating on what it meant to be so completely, so absurdly, in love. And many, many hours watching the Princess as she sat by the well: an unobserved observer: two large eyes dark with longing that poked through the water like two periscopes.
Princes and Frogs
There are two kinds of women: those who marry princes and those who marry
frogs. The frogs never become princes, but it is an acknowledged fact
that a prince may very well, in the course of an ordinary marriage, gradually,
at first almost imperceptibly, turn into a frog. Happy the woman who after
twenty-five years still wakes up beside the prince she fell in love with.
Entropy is the name that our scientists give to this phenomenon, the irreversible
downward slide of events: life becomes death, order becomes disorder,
princes become frogs. That is the way of the world, scientists say, and
most of us solemnly nod our heads in agreement. But the rules of physics,
though they resemble the rules of an ordinary marriage, do not at all
correspond to the rules of the human soul. There are no exceptions to
the rules of physics, whereas the rules of the soul consist of nothing
but exceptions. That is why I want to tell you a different kind of love
story, about a frog who became a prince.
At the Well
Excerpted from The Frog Prince by Stephen Mitchell. Copyright© 1999 by Stepehn Mitchell. Excerpted by permission of Harmony, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.