Owl at Home — Chapter 4

About This Passage

Selected because Owl arrives at a small philosophical conclusion through exhaustion rather than reasoning. The first three sentences are a quiet syllogism: "When I am up, I am not down. When I am down, I am not up. All I am is very tired." The fourth sentence is the elegant resolution. Notice that Lobel allows physical exhaustion to produce intellectual insight — the wisdom does not arrive before the running but after it. The mechanical lesson is in the parallel sentence structures and the way Lobel turns a children's stairway into a small treatise on accepting impossibility without surrendering desire.

Narration Prompt

Summarize this chapter, then explain what you think the author most wanted the reader to notice or feel. What techniques did the author use?

Discussion Questions

1. Owl frames his problem as a problem of insufficient speed: if he could run faster, he could be in two places at once. The framing is wrong — the problem is not about speed at all. Argue what Owl's choice of frame reveals about how he thinks problems are usually solved, and identify the kind of problem his speed-frame would actually fit.
2. Owl's final position is to sit on the tenth step — the middle of his twenty-step stairway. He has not solved the problem of being in two places at once. He has found a place that is not in either place but is in equal relation to both. Argue whether this is a real solution, a graceful surrender, or a third category our usual vocabulary about problem-solving does not name.

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide