by Antonio Napoli

A vizier summoned a sage, whom he often turned to for good advice.
“I have been told that you have come into contact with certain foreign scholars, and that this has not happened without harm.”
“What harm?” asked the sage, surprised.
“Well, you have embraced their doctrine, which holds that there is no single truth.”
“I do not deny it.”
“Then tell me: how can you console my doubts, if you yourself believe that one opinion is no better than another?”
“Perhaps acting with doubt is better than acting with certainty. How can a man believe he possesses the truth, when he possesses nothing of what he has: from life to external things, illusions of ownership swept away by military ruin, madness, and death?”
“Convince me with an example that the doctrine you now profess is no less valuable than the opposite one you held yesterday.”
The sage told this story:

“There was an African king named Jelani who would not make any important decision without first consulting the sorcerer Morathi. One day, not having seen him for several days, he sent for him: they found him in a pitiful state. Dirty, covered in fleas, with an absent gaze, repeating with his head in his hands: ‘Akanke, Akanke how I love you!’
The king was told that the wise, balanced, and judicious man, the arbiter between conflicting opinions, had lost his sanity over a woman seen in the square.
‘Impossible!’ he exclaimed upon hearing the news. He wanted to see for himself: the witnesses testified to what the heart did not want to believe.
The king tried to have Morathi cured and return to his senses, but without success.
Then a burning curiosity to know this Akanke overtook him. ‘If she was able to take my advisor’s sanity, surely she can draw an exclamation of wonder from my heart.’ The search was as meticulous as it was futile. There was no Akanke, or perhaps the woman was hiding under another name.
The king, however, did not give up: he organized a grand feast and set up an outdoor banquet. From there, he watched the people with his sorcerer sitting aside, away from the others, lost in his sorrow. And then, the great mind clouded by madness of the advisor cleared when a young woman came to serve the fruit in his place.
‘Akanke, Akanke!’ he shouted with joy.
The king signaled to the guards, and they brought the woman before him.
Jelani, seeing her up close, furrowed his brow. She was an ordinary woman, neither beautiful nor ugly; in her overall appearance, she was unremarkable, but not uninteresting. To the king, she resembled all the common women he met during his walks. How could she have made his advisor lose his mind? And in thinking this, he looked at him with pitying eyes.
Then the sorcerer, in a moment of clarity, smiled at the king and said:

“You look at Akanke with your eyes. Ah, if only you could, at least once, look at her with the eyes of Morathi!”