Hubley's Voyage

A likely likeness of Hubley (Tina Vanhove | unsplash.com)

Once upon a time there was a charming country house with a large garden. The garden was full of beautiful flowers, bushes and trees. It was a very peaceful place.

In the midst of the garden lay a round pond with clear, cool water. In the pond lived a red fish, and he was a rather peculiar fellow.

People of the house noticed right away that there was something unusual about the fish. They observed that he spent most of his days motionless, right in the middle of the pond.

This was, incidentally, how they came up with a name for him. Someone looking from the balcony of the house commented that the fish looked like a red hub of a black wheel. The person was an engineer, evidently. A little child then made a lovely drawing of a round pond with a fish in the middle, entitled "Hubley". The name stuck.

Over time however, as Hubley refused to swim, the people ceased to be so light-hearted. They started to worry about Hubley more and more every day. He was an expensive fish, after all.

"Why does Hubley not swim around? The pond is spacious enough indeed."

"Is he lacking some vitamins, or is he sick?"

They called for a test of the water quality and temperature, they consulted with garden fish experts on improvements to Hubley's feed. They even trimmed the bush of roses that showered its petals on the water just in case that was bothering him. But nothing helped.

To put it simply, Hubley was a melancholic fish. He felt there was more to life, and he longed for it painfully.

He appreciated his pond but, in spite of his proverbially short-term memory, he knew it far too well. As a matter of fact — if you spoke fish — he would have been able to give you a guided tour of every litre of water in the pond. Hubley also sensed beauty outside the pond. The colours, the play of light and shadows, and the muffled sounds were marvellous, but their inaccessibility was making him a little more sad every day.

Hubley had finally concluded that there was nowhere for him to go, nothing left for him to discover, that his life was void of any purpose. To top it all off, he could not even commiserate with anybody. In despair, he decided to take refuge in the one place that was the farthest from everything else.

But the centre of the pond only accentuated Hubley's gloom. He started to believe it was his fate to be sad and alone. He began to revel in his loneliness. He imagined he was in the pure centre of the world, in the sweetest spot. Alone in the nave of his cathedral. As close to nirvana as one could be. Just one step from nothingness.

Eventually, Hubley stopped eating. He was just hanging there, suspended and motionless in the middle of his pond.

The people of the house could see that Hubley was diminishing. They feared he might die soon. But they had no idea what more they could do.

The little girl who lived in the house loved the fish a lot. One Sunday, at breakfast, she proclaimed: "I think that Hubley is sad because he's in the middle of the pond!" The big people smiled the way adults smile when a cute little child says something obvious, and they continued eating their boiled eggs and toast. Only when it came to coffee, one of them pensively uttered there might actually be something to the idea. "Imagine, just for the sake of argument, that the pond would have no centre — could the fish then go and sulk there?"

The people of the house consulted a gardening firm and a week later Hubley observed a huge shadow hanging right above his head. Although out of his element, it was looming ever closer and bigger, and that frightened him a lot. With an instinctive jerk of his weary fins Hubley abandoned the centre of the pond and hid in the water plants at the perimeter. Then there was a booming noise and a lot of waves, and the water became opaque with mud.

The people of the house thanked the workers and were relieved to see the heavy crane leaving their carefully manicured lawn.

The task had been accomplished. Just where the nave used to be, the pond's surface was punctured by a sizeable rock. It had become a kind of island, really.

Long after the last ripple had died and the mud had sedimented, Hubley hesitantly came out of hiding and decided to head back to the middle of the pond. Only this time he could not find it so easily. He expected it right around a corner but it was not there, so he swam and swam, along endless shores.

Today, Hubley is still on his journey, swimming eagerly in the sincere hope that one day he will reach that most fulfilling of places — the nave of the world, the sweetest spot, the end.

When he grows tired, he rests. When he’s hungry, he eats. And then he continues on his quest.

There is no middle any more, but he swims on, blissfully unaware.

And the people of the house are happy to see Hubley swimming again. He has a good appetite and looks very healthy.

I first heard this little fable from Tony Judge at the time we worked together at the Union of International Associations in Brussels. He told it as a short amusing story with a touch of philosophy. I only reworked it into a longer piece.

In East Asian garden traditions, rocks, islands, and other features breaking the water’s surface are common elements of pond design. Classical Chinese and Japanese gardens frequently included islands or rocks within ponds to symbolize legendary places and to enhance aesthetic harmony. These features create naturalistic environments, providing fish with areas for exploration, shelter, and refuge, thus promoting active and engaging behaviour.

This humorous tale carries unexpected depth, exploring nothing less than the question of life's purpose. Our time and resources are inevitably limited — there is only so much we can experience or discover. Perhaps the way out of existential gloom is to create the illusion of a journey toward something greater, even if that destination remains forever unreachable. Might it even be essential to strive after impossible goals, precisely because they keep us curious, creative, and in motion?

Consider humanity’s fascination with the stars: although we may never truly reach distant suns or galaxies, this pursuit has propelled us toward astonishing discoveries and technological breakthroughs, transforming our perspective on the cosmos and enriching our lives.

What good fortune it is, then, to encounter obstacles positioned so strategically that they transform our mundane lives into exhilarating journeys across the vast expanses of the unknown — toward wonderful, even if ultimately unattainable, horizons!

Tomáš Fülöpp

Sint-Agatha-Berchem, Belgium

August 2, 2015

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