A parable from a Chinese text called the Huainanzi, which was written sometime before 139 BCE (the text containing this parable was presented as a gift to the then-Emperor Wu of Han that year, so it was presumably finished sometime thereabouts), goes something like this:
This puts me in mind of "The Bridge of San Luis Rey", a 1927 novel by American writer Thornton Wilder. The premise, from Wikipedia: "The Bridge of San Luis Rey tells the story of several interrelated people who die in the collapse of an Inca rope bridge in Peru, and the events that [led] up to their being on the bridge. A friar who witnesses the accident then goes about inquiring into the lives of the victims, seeking some sort of cosmic answer to the question of why each had to die."
The wikipedia article, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_of_San_Luis_Rey , is insistently positive about the book. But I loosely recall a Marxist critic in the 30s savaging it as a kind of quietist or right-wing propaganda.
This puts me in mind of "The Bridge of San Luis Rey", a 1927 novel by American writer Thornton Wilder. The premise, from Wikipedia: "The Bridge of San Luis Rey tells the story of several interrelated people who die in the collapse of an Inca rope bridge in Peru, and the events that [led] up to their being on the bridge. A friar who witnesses the accident then goes about inquiring into the lives of the victims, seeking some sort of cosmic answer to the question of why each had to die."
The wikipedia article, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_of_San_Luis_Rey , is insistently positive about the book. But I loosely recall a Marxist critic in the 30s savaging it as a kind of quietist or right-wing propaganda.