A problem must be solved, so we get to work solving it. But, alas, we sometimes unnecessarily complicate matters and make the problem harder to solve.
A man has two sons. While the elder son works hard at many tasks, the younger son sits around all day and does nothing. Tired of his son’s laziness, the father tells the younger son that he must learn a trade. The younger son assents, saying: “Well, father ... if it could but be managed, I should like to learn how to shudder.”
The boy had heard others describe frightening events and stories, yet he himself felt nothing. He thought that there must be an art to fearing.
Lessons in ‘Shuddering’
So, the sexton takes the younger boy home with him and sets him to work ringing the tower bell. One night, the sexton wakes the boy, and instructs him to ring the midnight bell. Yet, rather than going back to bed, the sexton hurries up into the tower.
Dressed in white and standing silently in the tower, the sexton tries to scare the boy. But the boy mistakes the sexton for a mischief-maker. He addresses the ghostly figure three times, but it doesn’t respond and the boy subsequently pushes it down the stairs.
When he hears that his son has hurt the sexton, the ashamed father sends him away. The younger son obediently leaves, all the while still wishing he could learn how to “shudder.”
On the road, the boy meets a traveler who says that he can get the boy to shudder. All the boy has to do, the man says, is spend a night under the gallows where seven dead men hang. But the evening passes and the boy remains unschooled in the art of shuddering.
Journeying on, the young man meets a wagoner who takes him to an inn, where the boy again mentions his wish to master shuddering. Hearing this, the innkeeper tells him of a haunted castle. Word has it that if a man can spend three nights in the castle without leaving, the king “promises that he who would venture should have his daughter to wife.”
Determined to learn shuddering, the boy spends three nights in the haunted castle. Each night, he encounters horrible ghosts and demons but remains unafraid. Thus, he conquers the haunted castle, banishes all the demons and ghosts, and wins the king’s daughter.
But, alas, he still can’t shudder. He wishes that he could, so much so that his wife, the princess, decides to take matters into her own hands.
Simplicity
Through this story, the Brothers Grimm showed several attempts to solve a problem. The trouble with these attempts is that they were too complicated and made a simple problem overly complex.Hercule Poirot put it perfectly in Agatha Christie’s “The Mysterious Affair at Styles”: “You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.”
Simplicity reduces chaos to order and overcomes overzealous imagination. Through simplicity, we see the world and our problems with renewed clarity and peace of mind.
