Today’s teaching cartoon captures a mini-drama and a pattern of “presumption and response.” We understand this in modern terms when this pattern is gives the sense of: be careful what you wish for.
This same pattern is found in old teaching stories. Such a pattern describes a timeless kind of conjunction of presumption and necessary response; or, perhaps better would be to say, inescapable response. Without giving the near layers of learning away–remember in the classic form there are seven layers of learning–it is enough to suggest how the result is wed to the initial assumption.
