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Mingli Books · Years 7–10

The Frog Who Measured the Sky

He measured it for forty years and every number he wrote down was correct. A retelling, and an argument with the way the story is usually told.

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There is a man in this town who proved something four years ago, and he has been explaining it to people ever since. It is a real proof. I have checked it. It is not a large proof but it is his, and it is correct.

He came to the door again on Thursday.

So I told him about the frog.

There was a frog who lived at the bottom of a well. He had not been put there and he was not trapped; he had been born at the bottom of that well, the way you were born in a particular country.

The way this story usually gets told, the frog is a fool.

He was not a fool. He was the finest scientist that well ever produced.

He measured the sky. It took him most of his life. The sky, he established, is a disc — not a dome, a disc, and he could prove it. It is forty hand-spans across. He measured it in summer and in winter, at noon and at dusk, from the north side of the water and the south side, and it came out at forty hand-spans every single time.

He worked out that the sky goes through eleven colours and that the order never varies. He worked out that it is crossed, on average, by four dark shapes a day, more in the warm months. He could tell you the date from the colour and be right within a week.

Everything in his book was checked. Everything in his book was true.

One morning something took a piece out of the sky.

It was a turtle, from the Eastern Sea, who had walked a long way and was resting. She looked down the well and said good morning, and the frog — who was polite, and who had never in his life met anybody with new information — asked her where she had come from.

She tried to tell him about the sea.

She was not a good explainer. She said it was big. She said that if you swam out for ten days you would not have got anywhere. She said that in a drought it does not go down and in a flood it does not go up, and the frog wrote that down, because it was the only part that sounded like a measurement.

Then he asked her how wide it was.

And she said she did not know. Nobody had ever measured it.

Here is the part I want you to sit with, because it is the part the usual telling leaves out.

The frog did the right thing.

He had one rule and he had kept it for forty years and it had never once let him down: do not accept a quantity that nobody has measured. It is a good rule. It is the rule that had made every number in his book correct. It is very close to the rule I would want you to keep.

And it was that rule, working exactly as it should, that told him the sea was not there.

He was not being stubborn. He was being careful. That is worse.

The turtle went away. She had not been trying to win anything and she had a long distance still to go.

In the spring a road came through, and the well was in the way of it, and they filled it in. Somebody put a hand down first, which was decent of them, and the frog came up in a bucket, and because nobody knew what to do with a frog they carried him a day and a half to the coast and set him down.

I do not know what he thought.

I have heard the version where he is ashamed, and the version where he is delighted, and I do not believe either of them, because both of them are what the person telling it would have felt.

He sat on the sand for a long time. That much is agreed.

And this is the thing nobody ever mentions. His book was still correct.

Forty hand-spans. Eleven colours, in that order. Four shapes a day and more in the warm months. Not one number in it had to be crossed out, then or ever, because every one of them was a true fact about that well.

A lifetime of correct work, and none of it was about the world.

That is the story. I told it to the man on Thursday, at my door, and I told it carefully and I did not add anything to the end of it.

He liked it very much. He said it was a good story about people who will not listen.

Then he went back to explaining his proof, and I stood there, and I understood that I had told it badly, or that there is no way to tell it well.

Afterwards

For whoever is reading alongside

Where it comes from

The frog in the well is about 2,300 years old. It is in the Zhuangzi, in the chapter called 秋水 — Autumn Floods — where a frog of a caved-in well boasts to a turtle of the Eastern Sea, and the turtle cannot get its left foot in before its right knee is stuck. In Chinese the whole story compresses into four characters, 井底之蛙, frog at the bottom of a well, which people still say to each other today.

What you have just read is not that story. It is a new one written against it, by the author of this site, which keeps the frog and the turtle and the well and changes what the frog is doing down there. In the original the frog is boasting. Here he is working, and that is the argument. If you want the real thing, read Zhuangzi — Burton Watson's and Brook Ziporyn's English translations are both good, and both are short.

How it is built

Notice that the story is told at somebody. It opens at a door and it closes at the same door, and the person it is aimed at is in the room. That is how these stories work in Chinese: they sit inside an argument and end in an accusation, rather than floating free and ending in a rule. The accusation here is aimed at the man on the doorstep. Whether it also lands anywhere else is not the story's business.

Two ways to read it, and they disagree

  • The frog's rule was wrong. A rule that can make a whole ocean disappear is a broken rule, however long it has worked. He needed a second rule for things too large to measure.
  • The frog's rule was right and he was unlucky. Keep his rule for a lifetime and you will be wrong about the sea exactly once and right about everything else. Drop it and you will believe anybody who turns up with a story.

You have to actually pick. Notice which one you wanted to pick before you had finished reading the other.

Questions with no answer key

  1. The narrator says three times that they do not know something. Find them, and explain what each one does to how much you trust the narrator.
  2. The turtle is a bad explainer. Would a better one have convinced him? Say what she could have said.
  3. Why does the last spread take place at the door and not at the sea? Discuss what changes if the story stops one page earlier.
  4. "He was not being stubborn. He was being careful. That is worse." Explore why the narrator thinks careful is worse than stubborn here. Do you agree?
  5. Name something you are confident about that you have only ever checked from one place.

Something to make

Write the same events as the turtle would tell them, to another turtle, a month later. She is not trying to make a point and she does not think the frog was foolish. Keep it under two hundred words.

One text, four years

This story reads whole at Year 7 — nothing in it needs a device a Year 7 has not met. What changes up the years is the job, not the text. The four descriptors below are quoted from the Australian Curriculum v9.

  1. Year 7 AC9E7LE05
    how characters, settings and events combine to make meaningThe frog and the turtle want different things from the same conversation. Explain how that difference, and not either character’s intelligence, produces the ending.
  2. Year 8 AC9E8LE03
    how language and images position readers to respondSeven pictures are vertical — a shaft, a disc of sky. Then the sea arrives and the book turns on its side and stays there. Explain what that does to you before you have read a word of that page.
  3. Year 9 AC9E9LE05
    allegory, symbolism and literary devicesThe well is not a well. Name what it stands for, then find the exact sentence where the text invites you to make that move — and the places where it declines to.
  4. Year 10 AC9E10LE04
    evaluate the social, moral or ethical positions represented“Do not accept a quantity that nobody has measured.” Evaluate that as a rule to live by. The story argues it is both the right rule and the cause of the disaster.

Year 8’s descriptor is the one this collection was built for: its own elaboration reads “discussing how a complex picture book combines words and images to position readers to respond”. Every story here is a complex picture book, and the picture is never a decoration of the sentence beside it.

The analytical ethical work belongs under Ethical Understanding, Level 5 (Years 7–8) and Level 6 (Years 9–10) rather than under the English Literature strand, which has no moral-position descriptor before Year 10.