Black Sheep

Calvino shows readers a fictional world based on reality. This world has no beginning and end, no space and time. It mechanically repeats its rules of the game day after day within the framework of a country. Stealing and being stolen, all property circulates in a balanced manner in this unwritten form. It is like a chaotic era that has not yet been created. No one questions the existence of this country and the meaning of its existence. Although stealing day and night is an unwritten rule, everyone silently obeys and never thinks or resists. . Citizens are like those docile lambs in the Bible, grazing obediently and carefully in their own space within a huge fence. They are the group of people mentioned in the Bible "Jeremiah" who "have eyes but cannot see, and ears but cannot hear."

Calvino [Italian]

Once upon a time there was a country where everyone was a thief.

At dusk, they hold the omnipotent He went out with his keys and blackout lantern and went to his neighbor's house to steal. At dawn, when they returned home with their stolen goods, they always found that their own home had also been stolen.

They live happily like this Together. There are no unlucky people, because everyone steals from someone else, who steals from someone else, and so on, until the last person goes to the first thief's house to steal. Trade in this country is inevitably a two-way deception on the part of buyers and sellers. The government is a criminal institution that steals from its subjects, who are only interested in deceiving the government. So life is stable, there are no rich and poor.

One ​​day - what happened No one knows what happened - but an honest man settled there. In the evening, he went out without carrying a bag or a lantern, but stayed at home smoking and reading novels.

The thief came and saw that the light was on, so he didn't go in.

This went on for a while. Then they felt the need to make it clear to him that even if he wanted to live his life doing nothing, there was no reason for him to interfere with other people's work. He would do it every night Staying at home means that one family will have no food rations for the next day.

The honest man feels that he is powerless to resist such logic. From then on he is like them, going out at night and returning home the next morning, but he does not steal. He is honest. In this regard, You are powerless. He walked to the bridge in the distance and watched the river flowing under the bridge. Every time he came home, he would find that his home had been stolen.

In less than a week, the honest man found himself penniless; his house was bare and he had nothing to eat. But It's not nothing, because it's his own fault; no, the problem is that his behavior upsets other people. Because he lets others steal everything from him but doesn't steal anything from others; there's always someone there When I returned home at dawn, I found that the house had not been touched - honest people should have gone in and stolen. Soon after, those who had not been robbed found that they were richer than others, and they did not want to steal anymore. Worse Yes, those who go to honest people's houses to steal always find them empty, and therefore they become poor.

At the same time, those who have become rich, like honest people, have developed the habit of going to the bridge at night, and they also watch the river flowing under the bridge. In this way , the situation is even more confusing, because it means that more people are getting richer and more people are getting poorer.

Now, those rich people find that if they go to the bridge every day, they will soon become poor. They think: "We Let's hire poor people to steal for us. "They signed the contract and finalized the salary and how to share it. Naturally, they are still thieves and still fight against each other.deceive each other. But the situation shows that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

Some people are so rich that they don’t even need You can stay rich by stealing yourself or hiring someone to steal. But once they stop stealing, they will become poor because the poor will steal from them. So they hired the poorest of the poor to help guard their wealth from the poor, which meant building police stations and prisons.

Therefore, where the honest man appears Within a few years, people no longer talked about stealing or being stolen, but only about the poor and the rich; but they were all still thieves.

The only honest one is the one at the beginning man, but he soon died of starvation.