Robert Louis Stevenson’s Fables as Contemplative Wisdom

“How if this be the truth – that all are a little true?”

Sunday, 30th October 2022
15:00–16:30 GMT (online via Zoom)

Robert Louis Stevenson’s fables are little-known masterpieces by this supreme story-teller.

This online seminar is the latest in a series under the general title Unity in Diversity.

Led by Robert-Louis Abrahamson

These fables express views that probably would have scandalised many of Robert Louis Stevenson’s devoted readers. They expose the absurdity of deflecting ourselves from the reality of the moment by falling into abstract thinking, and the hollowness of religious forms when divorced from compassion and human contact. Several stories dramatise the emptiness of a life of superficial conformity, and the futility of insisting that one’s own version of the truth is the only right version.

The fables show Stevenson following in a contemplative tradition unawares, trying to articulate his view of human life without the help of a religious or philosophical tradition. The stories express it all, leaving us, as all wisdom literature leaves us, to ponder the meanings and test them against our experience of life. They are also stories that draw us in: witty, vivid and shocking, engaging to read or to hear being read.

This talk will be a time of story-telling, with readings from several of the fables, and commentary, leading in to a general discussion afterwards.

Robert-Louis Abrahamson is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Maryland. He studied Scottish literature at Edinburgh University and has spent much of his career working with mythic literature, mainly from the Western tradition. He has spoken and published on Dante, the American Transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson) and Charles Williams, and on his namesake, Robert Louis Stevenson. He gave a presentation on Thoreau in 2017 at the Chisholme Institute, and for the Beshara Trust one on Edwin Muir in 2018 and an online presentation on Dante in 2021. His edition of Stevenson’s Virginibus Puerisque, the first of five volumes of Stevenson’s essays for the Edinburgh University Press’s 40-volume Works of Stevenson, was published in 2018. His edition of Stevenson’s Fables, with commentary, entitled Aesop in the Fog, was published in 2022.