"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.
-Kafka, A Little Fable
I briefly read the moral as something like this; something along the lines of "being exposed in the open was the worst thing the mouse could imagine, so it ran blindly away from it without asking what the alternatives were". I'm still not sure I actually get it.
Tangentially, keeping mouse traps in a house with a cat seems hazardous (though I could be underestimating cats). And I assume "day" and "chamber" are used abstractly.
Another monthly installment of the rationality quotes thread. The usual rules apply: