Word: tigers
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...Here is the riddle: Did the barbaric princess urge her lover to choose the door leading to marriage to a beautiful young woman of whom the princess was already jealous? Or did she direct him to choose the tiger, and his own death...
...across the puzzle the other day in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s new memoir, "A Life in the Twentieth Century." Schlesinger says that the game of The Lady or the Tiger became widely popular when Stockton proposed it more than a century ago. The poet Robert Browning announced that he "had no hesitation in supposing that such a princess under such circumstances would direct her lover to the tiger's door...
...pessimist/cynic opts for the tiger, I suppose. The optimist/romantic votes for the lady. I have a sappy, soap opera kind of mind, I regret to report. I decided immediately that the princess would have done the sweet and selfless thing, and, like Rick Blaine sending Ilsa Lund off with Victor Lazlo on the Lisbon plane at the end of "Casablanca," would have sacrificed her own happiness, swallowed her regret, and withdrawn in a fog of nobility...
...There's something more astringently satisfying in the tiger option. Either way, it's a pretty primal choice, if you think about it - an annihilating ferocity of ego version a gesture of self-abnegation that approaches a religious dimension...
...mildly curious to know how Al Gore and George W. Bush would react as readers of the fable. Would they say the princess directed the young man to happiness with the lady, or to death with the tiger...