Take a Lamp

by rjs
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Published on: June 15, 2011

Take a Lamp

Once Nasruddin instructed his son Ahmet to go outside to see if the sun had risen. When the boy returned from outside, he said, “I cannot tell for sure — it is still too dark to tell if it is sunrise yet.”

“You young fool,” said Nasruddin, “why didn’t you take a lamp with you?”

Excerpted from The Uncommon Sense of the Immortal Mullah Nasruddin: Stories, Jests, and Donkey Tales of the Beloved Persian Folk Hero

Your Daily Nasruddin

To wake up early enough to find and light a lamp (nowadays we’d say flashlight) to see if the sun has risen means you have deprived yourself of sleep to engage in foolish behavior. It is guaranteed that more than a day full of foolishness is coming your way, indeed this day of confusion may never end for you.

The stories in which Nasruddin instructs his boy, or is instructed as a boy himself, are of great interest as wisdom stories. Often logic is reversed in the transmission of the teaching, which engages the listener or reader intellectually by providing the mind with a paradox to chew on.

When a person engages in time-wasting, worthless activity, we say that it is like “taking a lamp to see if the sun has risen.”

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