The Fable and the Mirror: On Jean de La Fontaine and the Art of Seeing Clearly
Prologue
“A man often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.”
I did not begin with Jean de La Fontaine.
I began with a single sentence.
I came across this quote unexpectedly, and something in it lingered. Not intellectually at first, but viscerally. It felt like a key without a door. I found myself returning to it over several days, sensing that it was pointing toward something I already knew but had not yet fully articulated.
That curiosity led me down a quiet rabbit hole.
I began reading about La Fontaine, about fable writing, about the historical role of allegory. What unfolded was less a discovery than a recognition. I realised I had been writing in this tradition long before I had language for it.
When I wrote Fatima’s Alchemy, I did not consciously decide to construct moral fables. The stories emerged through a stream of inner dialogue during a period of profound personal dismantling and reconstruction. Fatima appeared to me not as a character I invented, but as a presence that guided the writing. When I believed I could not write, she spoke. When I entered meditation, our conversations continued. The stories followed.
Each narrative carried a moral and a metaphor, not as instruction, but as invitation. I wanted the reader to leave not with answers, but with a clearer mirror—a way of reflecting their own life, their own patterns, their own turning points. Writing became less about expression and more about orientation.
Only later did I recognise that this instinct had deeper roots.
As a child, I was profoundly drawn to symbolic storytelling. Hans Christian Andersen’s tales travelled with me everywhere. I read them repeatedly, forming relationships with the characters and the emotional landscapes they inhabited. Stories like The Wishing Chair by Enid Blyton and other mythic narratives shaped my imagination long before I understood their psychological significance. Those books still sit on my shelf today, not as nostalgia, but as reminders of a language I have always spoken.
Encountering La Fontaine as an adult felt like meeting a distant relative in the lineage of thought. Not imitation. Recognition. “Affirmation that the instinct I had been following had deeper roots and longer company than I had known.
This piece grew from that recognition.
The Fable and the Mirror
On Jean de La Fontaine and the Art of Seeing Clearly
“A man often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.”
Jean de La Fontaine
There is a particular kind of writing that does not argue with you.
It does not instruct. It does not accuse. It does not demand agreement or resistance.
It simply places something in front of you — a story, an image, an animal caught in a moment of consequence — and waits.
What you recognise in it is your own responsibility.
This is the nature of the fable.
And it is, I have come to understand, the reason I write the way I do.
Jean de La Fontaine lived between 1621 and 1695 in the France of Louis XIV — an era defined by hierarchy, spectacle, and the careful choreography of social appearance. Power was centralised. Dissent was costly. Truth, if it was to travel at all, had to move with subtlety.
La Fontaine found his method in the ancient tradition of the fable. Drawing from Aesop and Phaedrus, he understood that animals could speak where humans could not safely do so. Yet where his predecessors were functional, La Fontaine was literary. He brought psychological nuance, poetic elegance, and a quiet irony that allowed his observations to be both beautiful and dangerous.
His collections of Fables, published between 1668 and 1694, became one of the most enduring works in European literature. Today, they are often misfiled as children’s tales. In truth, they are studies of social reality written in a form that could not easily be condemned.
Allegory has always understood what direct instruction forgets: not every mind can be reached through argument, but almost every mind can be reached through story.
What makes La Fontaine’s work feel alive rather than historical is that he was never writing about a single event or political moment. He was mapping recurring patterns of human behaviour — the same negotiations between power and conscience, ambition and restraint, illusion and consequence appearing beneath different costumes across centuries.
In The Wolf and the Lamb, power invents justification. The wolf devours the lamb not because truth supports him, but because force allows him. The argument he constructs is not meant to persuade. It is meant to provide cover.
In The Fox and the Grapes, disappointment reshapes perception. Unable to reach what he desires, the fox decides it was never worth having. The self-deception is seamless.
In The Crow and the Fox, flattery becomes a precision instrument. Vanity opens every door.
In The Lion’s Share, authority simply takes what it wants and names the arrangement fair.
These are not relics. They are structural features of human behaviour that surface whenever pressure increases, resources tighten, or collective certainty begins to fracture. When security feels threatened, power rationalises itself. When status anxiety rises, image becomes currency. When hierarchy consolidates, appetite reveals itself beneath the language of order.
The fable does not accuse.
It does not need to.
It illuminates.
Recognition occurs within the reader, bypassing the resistance that direct confrontation would provoke. This is its genius. It allows truth to arrive without force.
Historically, fable writing has flourished during periods of censorship, social fragmentation, or instability precisely because it creates the distance necessary for perception to shift. Allegory offers psychological safety. It says: " This is only a story. What you choose to see in it belongs to you.
And yet the seeing happens.
This is why symbolic forms endure while topical commentary fades. La Fontaine was not documenting a court. He was revealing the permanent theatre of human nature — the ways social systems reward performance and resist inconvenient clarity.
From an alchemical perspective, fables function as mirrors disguised as narrative. They bypass the defensive intellect and speak instead to pattern memory — that quieter intelligence which recognises before it can explain. The story has already done its work by the time language catches up.
This understanding sits beneath everything I write.
La Fontaine serves not merely as a historical reference but as a demonstration of what purposeful symbolic writing can achieve. He showed that moral insight can be transmitted through indirection. That perception can be opened without coercion, so that the reader can arrive at recognition without being led there by instruction.
Field Whispers emerged from this same principle. Rather than prediction or ideology, the writing explores what I think of as psychological weather — the subtle relationship between timing, perception, and lived consequence. Each reflection attempts to illuminate patterns moving beneath events, not to tell anyone what to think, but to offer a lens through which thinking might deepen.
The fable taught me that durable writing does not resolve discomfort.
It invites the reader to remain with what they notice.
This same philosophy shaped Fatima’s Alchemy. It is not simply a collection of stories. It is a symbolic map of moral orientation — a sequence of mirrors through which recurring human dynamics can be observed without interference. Each narrative presents the moment where perception meets choice, where instinct confronts consequence, and where character reveals itself through action rather than belief.
In times of rapid change and competing narratives, instruction alone rarely reaches the deeper psyche. People are saturated with opinion and urgency. What they require is not more direction, but a different quality of seeing. Allegory offers this. It provides pattern instead of prescription. Recognition instead of argument. The dignity of arriving at one’s own understanding.
La Fontaine understood that human nature evolves more slowly than the systems we construct. That vanity, power, fear, and conscience will continue to shape behaviour beneath every new technological or political landscape.
He did not write to expose a moment.
He wrote to illuminate a pattern.
Perhaps this is the oldest task of the storyteller.
Not to accuse.
Not to instruct.
Not to predict.
But to hold the mirror at the precise angle where what has always been known can finally be seen.
The fable does not force recognition.
It simply makes looking possible.
It is remarkable how imagination can carry us further than intention.
A single sentence became a road.
That road became recognition.
And recognition led me back to what I had always known.
Imagination carried me where effort never could.
In following it, I began to understand that destiny is not always something we chase.
Sometimes it is something we finally stop avoiding.
Delahrose Roobie Myer
Confidante • Catalyst • Clarifier
Astrologer • Designer • Renewal Coach
Author, Fatima’s Alchemy
Delahrose is a visionary advisor working privately with individuals and projects in times of transition and reinvention. Through deep listening and symbolic insight, she brings underlying patterns into view, enabling clear, self-directed movement forward.
Field Notes delahrose.substack.com
