The Frog Prince: A Fairy Tale for Consenting Adults - Hardcover

Mitchell, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609605453 ISBN 13: 9780609605455

Publisher: Harmony, 1999

Synopsis

In this brilliant jewel of a book, the best-selling author of Tao Te Ching: A New English Version expands and deepens the classic fairy tale in the most surprising and delightful ways, giving new emphasis to its message of the transcendent power of love.

The Frog Prince tells the story of a meditative frog's love for a rebellious princess, how she came to love him in spite of herself, and how her refusal to compromise helped him become who he truly was. This is a magical book that moves (amphibiously) from story to meditation and back, from the outrageous to the philosophical to the silly to the sublime. Profound, touching, written in prose as lively and unpredictable as a dream, The Frog Prince tickles the mind, opens the heart, and holds up a mirror to the soul.

About this title

About the Author:

Stephen Mitchell has written, edited, and translated dozens of books, including The Book of Job, Tao Te Ching, Parables and Portraits, The Gospel According to Jesus, A Book of Psalms, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, and Genesis.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Princes and Frogs

There are two kinds of women: those who marry princes and those who marry frogs. The frogs never become princes, but it is an acknowledged fact that a prince may very well, in the course of an ordinary marriage, gradually, at first almost imperceptibly, turn into a frog. Happy the woman who after twenty-five years still wakes up beside the prince she fell in love with.

Entropy is the name that our scientists give to this phenomenon, the irreversible downward slide of events: life becomes death, order becomes disorder, princes become frogs. That is the way of the world, scientists say, and most of us solemnly nod our heads in agreement. But the rules of physics, though they resemble the rules of an ordinary marriage, do not at all correspond to the rules of the human soul. There are no exceptions to the rules of physics, whereas the rules of the soul consist of nothing but exceptions. That is why I want to tell you a different kind of love story, about a frog who became a prince.

Once Upon a Time
It all began . . .
But let me step back and begin before the actual beginning. There is a good deal of background material that I ought to fill you in on, and a certain number of necessary explanations. The traditional rendition of the story, which we can call the Condensed Version, tells everything in six and a half minutes, plunging straight into the thick of things with the Princess and her golden ball. Besides, it is a version for children, who don't require explanations of the extraordinary. Children understand that Once upon a time refers not only--not even primarily--to the past, but to the impalpable regions of the present, the deeper places inside us, where princes and dragons, wizards and talking birds, impassable roads, impossible tasks, and happy endings have always existed, alive and bursting with psychic power.

Let me start by reminding you that not all princesses in these ancient tales are beautiful. They don't have to be: they are princesses. But our princess was, in fact, a most attractive young woman. How attractive? Well, the Condensed Version, which is usually quite straightforward about details, gets caught up in its enthusiasm when it describes her. "She was so beautiful," it says, "that the sun, who had seen so many things, was filled with wonder every time he shined onto her face." This is charming, to be sure, but why the hyperbole? It is true that the Princess was lovely; you might even have called her--on certain days, in certain moods, in certain rare subtleties of light--beautiful. But there are many beautiful young women scattered across the globe, walking in high heels or in sneakers down every main street of every city on earth, and if the sun were to stop and stare at each of them, our days and our nights would be longer than I can easily tell. No, exaggerations like this don't occur to a storyteller out of the blue; there is always a reason, and the reason here, I think, is that the more difficult side of our princess's character must have made the teller of the Condensed Version uncomfortable. For the outer mirrors the inner, and there is no character flaw that, to a discerning eye, does not manifest itself on the faces of even the surpassingly beautiful, making them far less a cause for wonder than is the face of a plain young woman with a loving heart.

In short, the Princess was proud; she was ungrateful; she was headstrong. But we will come to all that in due course.

Our story takes place in the High Renaissance, in one of the small, prosperous French kingdoms whose châteaux along the Loire and the Saône are among the glories of European architecture. "French kingdoms, plural?" you may be asking. It is a natural question, and I must stop again to explain.

The Crack on the Surface of Reality
A century and three quarters before our story begins, during the first, tentative stages of the Renaissance, when one Western mind-world was dying and another was in the throes of being born, the wisest men and women in Europe could observe a hairline crack, as it were, on the surface of reality. This kind of crack is more likely to form in the life of an individual than in the life of an entire culture. When a woman or a man undergoes a deep spiritual transformation, there are certain critical points along the way when what is partial needs to be shattered in order to become what is whole. At such points, the hidden powers and illnesses of the soul may be unleashed, giving rise to bizarre phenomena in which darkness and light are interchangeable and in which it is sometimes difficult to distinguish miracle from madness.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harmony
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0609605453
• ISBN 13: 9780609605455
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192