‘They say a crow saw a partridge walk
and was much pleased with her gait.
He conceived hopes he too could learn it;
but he could not.
When he finally gave up,
as he couldn’t learn,
he wanted to go back to his own way of walking,
but he could not do that either,
as he had forgotten it.’

(From the Kalila va Dimnah)

Imitations never did work. One ceases to be what one was, and cannot become what one aspired to be. The originality is lost, and the borrowed manners do not fit. Neither crow nor partridge. It does not know how to walk any more. With him remains the shame of having rejected his own manner, and the frustration not to have learned the foreign one. Now he cannot follow the foreign way, because he has not grasped it, nor his own because he has disowned it. He will never walk at ease for the ret of his life. It was a bad moment for the crow when he paid attention to the partridge.

The soul and its gait. Steps on the rods of the spirit. The temptation to imitate others. Enticement to submission Invitations to copy. Promises to walk like a partridge. The crow is enticed, begins his lessons, tries the steps, feigns the movements, but in the end gets discouraged because he sees by experience that those rhythms are not meant for him. He cannot return to his old ways, because he has publicly repudiated them, and he cannot adopt the new ones because he has not mastered them and never will. And so he is left with that uneasy, ungainly, clumsy carriage of one who wanted to be something and has failed in the effort, and drags along now in his life the half-hearted patterns that give satisfaction to no one. Imitation is death.

The parable, in its didactic brevity, teaches the fundamental principle of all popular wisdom, namely that each thing has to be what it is; each being has to act, according to its nature, and in doing that there is satisfaction and progress and success. Trying to change one’s individuality is destroying it. There is now no question of carriage and movement, but of thoughts and feelings. If I am a crow, I will walk as a crow and caw like a crow and look like a crow, and I will not mind the clumsy step and the black colour and the harsh voice. Neither boast nor shame. I am a crow by birth and am proud or it.

Out in the fields the cows now keep walking as crows, and the partridges as partridges. They have learnt the lesson of the unhappy crow. But in cities and villages men and women keep trying to imitate one another in walk, in dress, in fashion, in ideas, in customs, in postures of the body, and in attitudes of the mind. And that is how we far. Chiefly the young. Walk as you are told. By your group. Do not lose your step.