Coming out
I have for most of my life (that is, all the bit since the age of about 10) been a closet children’s book reader. When the ‘cool’ kids were reaching for Stephen King, I went wandering with Jo March. When the hip college students were carrying Kafka, I hid in the secret garden with Mary. When the reading western world fell gooey-in-love with Salman Rushdie, I went to Imperial Japan with Katherine Paterson. I searched the woods of words for Terebinthia and Perelandra. I went to Sherwood Forest and Camelot and Tintagel. It’s not like I never read grown-up books. I do! But even then, my favorites of those tend to be books that edge not so much into the supernatural, but into the supranormal. The edge of existence where all things seem possible, even if they aren’t really — that lingering, lurking murky darkness that births fairy tales.
And while I’m confessing, there’s another thing I’ve always been closeted about. I reread books. Over and over. I long to enter their worlds again, see their skies, taste the air. I keep going back to Green Gables. I surrender once again to the inexorable will of Mary Poppins. I climb the Faraway Tree. The idea of never again visiting Oz or Narnia or the pioneer west… oh no. Not possible, absolutely incomprehensible, no way. I will always return, like one who has drunk the waters of the Nile who must therefore always come back to Om id-dunya, Cairo, the mother of the world.
What ’s intereresting about this is that I had to turn forty (or maybe just a bit before) to freely admit this to people. Seriously. Thirty years of guiltily hiding The House at Pooh Corner inside the New Yorker? It’s silly. But one of the most wonderful things about me getting older (although the children would just say old) is that I grow into myself more and more fully. And suddenly it doesn’t matter if a few people think I’m two measures short of a sonata. The people who matter won’t care. A few might even nod knowingly and suggest a new writer I might like. And that’s worth more than pearls, more than salt.
Well put. And if you’re like me, the genetic recombinance of re-mastering of The Chronicles of Narnia in supposed “chronological” order was an abomination. Unforgivable crime.
Seriously. It is horrible, I agree, but I cannot convince the children that the new order is wrong because, look Mommy, 1, 2, 3… right on the spines! Grrr. Of course, C.S. Lewis WANTED people to read them in this order rather than the order he wrote them in, but this is just evidence that writers cannot be trusted about their own work and should be gently led off to a comfy seat and given canapes.