One of the things that I look forward to the most about having a daughter is introducing her to the life of the imagination. C.S. Lewis once said somewhere that while the intellect is the "organ of truth," the imagination is the "organ of meaning." In light of this insight, it should not be surprising, then, that so much of what passes for children's literature--or any literature, for that matter--lacks any real contact with reality. By "reality," I don't mean the "facts" of everyday life, but the old "verities," as William Faulkner called them--the permanent things that have always been true: justice, mercy, forgiveness, hope, courage, etc. These "verities" seem to have gone missing in much of our literature because the imagination, or "organ of meaning," has been either suppressed or abandoned in an attempt to be politically correct or to produce literature sensitive to particular psychological, sociological, or political agendas.
I found this interesting piece written by Anthony Esolen at Touchstone Magazine's Mere Comments blog. In it, he writes about a book he owns called The Young Folks' Shelf of Books, published in 1938. William Allan Nielson, former president of Smith College, writes the introduction to the volume and says that many of the fairy tales, adventure stories, and other more contemporary stories selected for the volume belong there because they "deal with certain permanent and fundamental elements in our common nature." Nielson goes on to add: "It is fundamental for the ethical as well as aesthetic development that the imagination should be given wide scope in youth and kept free and flexible as long as possible." It seems to me that many people today would not put this much stock in the power of the imagination (perhaps that's because they confuse imaginary with imaginative). If we want children to grow up to not only believe in justice, mercy, courage, etc., but also to love those things, then we must expose them to great works of literature and nurture their imaginations. They must be brought away from their own worlds and into, as Esolen puts it, "realms far away or long ago...to sweep their hearts the more swiftly into the world, I mean the only real world there is, the one wherein there are such things as good and evil, and brave and handsome men, and lovely and steadfast women..."
--Michael
5 comments:
I need to track down this work by Esolen. Those last lines reminded me of a conversation I was a part of this week about the hope of heaven being the only true way of coping with pain in this lifetime (Don Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz, was a part of this conversation and recommended a book called The Shack which is on this topic). We were talking about the end of The Last Battle, how life really began for those characters when they found themselves in heaven, and how if we as Christians would live with a healthy realization of death, we would probably live much more profound and peaceful lives.
The imagination is something truly lacking in a lot of kids "these days" as seen by their bafflement with what to do with toys that require anything besides pushing buttons. Good ideas here.
Honey, this is why I have a little OCD issue with collecting children's books. I am READY.
Very insightful Michael. That sounds like a good article. I'm going to try and track it down.
We have the entire Narnia collection on audio Cd and everyday at rest my boys will say..I want to listen to Magician's nephew cd....3. They have it memorized down to what passage is on what CD!! It's amazing. I love seeing Sam understand and get the connections between Lewis and Tolkein's works. He understands the references and it gives us so much depth to discuss. He certainly enjoys SpongeBob, but his tastes are wide and varied and we have been able to discuss many difficult topics through great literature. I am watching the Great Books live and breathe in my boys and it is wondrous!!
i love this post!
yesterday i had some women over and we started talking about fairies and santa claus and all things imaginary. i told them about a blog friend of mine whose children left a note for some fairies under the tree in her front yard. so she started writing back to the kids pretending to be a fairy named remous. i gushed about how i hope to one day have children and do something similar. and then i said that i still like to imagine fairies exist. a couple of my friends sort of scoffed at me and couldn't believe what i was saying.
it made me sad. so this post made me happy again. thank you :)
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