“Now ordinary people are born forwards in Time, if you understand what I mean, and nearly everything in the world goes forward too…. But I unfortunately was born at the wrong end of Time, and I have to live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind.” – Merlyn in The Once and Future King
When I was in grade school, I embarked on a quest to read every Great Book ever written. If the library housed it on the Classics shelf, or if I had heard someone call it “important,” that was enticement enough to read it – especially if a grown-up told me I was too young to understand. If it weighed more than the average lapdog, I considered that a bonus.
A true story: one day, during the summer between eighth and ninth grades, I emerged from my bedroom to find out why my family had suddenly huddled around the TV. Breaking news! I watched for about three minutes as Al Cowlings drove OJ Simpson down the freeway in the world’s slowest high-speed chase… then I got bored and returned to reading Les Misérables. Unabridged.
However, somewhere in my zero-to-sixty race from Anne of Green Gables to Anna Karenina, I missed reading many of the “childhood classics.” I had never even heard of The Chronicles of Narnia until I was in college. I think I was thirty when I first read Peter Pan. I can be excused for not reading Harry Potter until I was twenty-one because the first book wasn’t published until I was eighteen. But I am glad I found these books so late because discovering gems like The Little Prince and A Wrinkle in Time (both of which I read for the first time within the last year) has been one of the great joys of my adulthood. They’re better now than they would have been when I was young. I would have enjoyed them then, but I would not have found them challenging. Now, however… what could be more challenging to a frenetic adult than simplicity? What could be harder to grasp in this relativistic world than the clear, pure morality of childhood?
It’s been said that the Good Books – the ones that are meant to shape our imaginations in childhood – prepare us to encounter the Great Books, and that is true enough. Children need the children’s classics, and I was no exception. But I’m finding that the process works equally well in reverse: having read the Great Books makes me appreciate the Good Books even more. Having fought my way through the contrapassos of the Inferno gives me the foundation from which to appreciate how Charles Wallace Murry’s heightened senses of perception can blind him to the reality of the dangers he encounters in A Wrinkle in Time. That’s because great children’s literature and great grown-up literature are great for the same reason: both wrestle with the deepest quandaries and questions of our human lives, especially our moral lives, and they’re “great” because they do so in a way that resonates with Truth. But, at the risk of sounding like a simpleton, I admit that I often find the children’s books more relevant to my current state of life.
Fiction exists to nourish the mind, but more importantly, to nourish the soul. When I was young, both my mind and my soul needed challenge. I needed depth and complexity to help me expand, grow, develop. Life itself was simple: go to school, do homework, play – read. Reading was the doorway into broader, more convoluted worlds. I needed thousand-page tomes penned by great thinkers to serve as guides, signposts, and warnings on the road of life. Now, however, both my mind and soul are daily drowning in complexity. Husband, children, job, other job, mortgage, politics, doctors… Reading has become a doorway into worlds that help to filter out the noise, worlds that clarify and simplify and bring life back into focus. I need books that kindle the sparks of simple joys and give me courage to face life’s monsters. When I was a child, I read to become a grown-up; now that I am a grown-up, I read to become a child.
Just call me Merlyn.
Wonderful. I’ve been doing much the same now by going though these books with my kids. Within the past couple of years, I’ve encountered for the first time Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, A Little Princess, and Redwall, among others, and it’s been a delight. I’ve also enjoyed the chance to re-read the Chronicles of Narnia. I’m working the kids up to a point when I can start sharing Tolkien with them.
I’m eagerly awaiting the day when my kids outgrow Dr. Seuss and are ready to move on to some of these books. I got the older one (age 7) to sit through most of The Little Prince, but I’m not sure how much he got out of it. In the meantime, I checked out Winnie-the-Pooh for myself, and I think I’ll get The Wind in the Willows next!
I had a children’s literature class in undergrad and, as the reading list that year ranged around 50+ novels, saved the kids lit for last and had the glorious experience of blitz-reading The Jungle Book (the first time) and Peter Pan (the second – but the first time wasn’t anything special) in one evening and was promptly demolished. The next day, after Charlotte’s Web, I had to give my wildly aching heart a break.
Charlotte’s Web… My mom read that to me and my brother when we were about 6 and 8. We read a chapter each day. When it came time for the end, my mom, who had never read it before, skipped ahead and read the last chapter while we were at school. She sobbed so much, she made my dad (who hadn’t been following the story) read the ending to us that night. The whole family was pretty much one big sobfest. I still haven’t had the courage to pick that one up again as a grown up!
Karen, I love your closing comment. Your reading history matches my own and so I identify completely with your “I.” I first read Lord of the Rings in my sixties!
I’m 73 and still working on growing up into childhood–in all ways.
Thanks, Dena. I hope I’m still “growing up into childhood” when I’m 73, too!
The Great Books are like mountains—lofty peaks that are rewarding, but take enormous effort to climb. Reading the Good Books is like a steady hike around a lake—still sometimes difficult, but mostly exhilarating.
Johnathan, I really want to like this image. As an analogy, it works beautifully. But I keep looking at the great big cast on my right foot and thinking, “Please don’t let reading be like hiking, or I’m doomed.”
Awesome article! “If it weighed more than the average lapdog, I considered that a bonus.” Lol!
Because I chose to major in English, some of my college friends were surprised that I hadn’t grown up on LOTR, Narnia, and other requisite Catholic fantasy/childhood literature. My family home was not piled up with books. Perhaps much like Elizabeth Bennet, though we were encouraged to read, “Those who chose to be idle, certainly might.” In fact I cultivated a *hatred* of books until my teens years because my older sister, whose attention I was constantly trying to gain, always had her nose in a book!
The movie “James and the Giant Peach” made Roald Dahl fashionable for a while, so that might have been my first childhood literature, followed by H.G. Wells, Verne, and Stevenson. The wonderful “Great Illustrated Classics” series also exposed me to the great stories, at least in brief. Based on the illustrations, I formed my first literary crush on Nancy from “Oliver Twist.” Homeschooling made sure I eventually did get to the great books.
This may be laughable, at least it makes me laugh, but I believe my penchant for language came from the cartoons I watched as a kid. I think I grew up in the Renaissance period of cartoons; witty shows like Garfield & Friends, Eek the Cat, Tiny Toons, Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain were primarily wordplay-driven (as opposed to the scatology and sight gags of today’s cartoons). I remember allusions to Shakespeare, Moby Dick, The Raven, Shakespeare, etc. Perhaps some of them were a tad more adult than I’d recommend giving kids to watch, but like innuendos in Shakespeare, I don’t know that they harmed me very much.
I had many of the Illustrated Classics series, too, although as soon as I learned what the word “abridged” meant, I resented the editors for trying to dumb them down. (In hindsight, I’m grateful they got me interested enough to read the real books.) But I still liked the pictures, especially from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. What’s not to like about a giant pink octopus trying to swallow a submarine?
I didn’t major in English because my first college English class tried very hard to destroy everything I loved about books. But maybe it was cartoons – especially Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry – that pushed me toward my major in music!