"“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis
Image by https://unsplash.com/@matblueforest
I have an embarrassing secret. I am happy to tell you what it is so long as you don’t tell anyone. Is that a deal? This is my secret. I love children’s books. At my age I should know better, but it's an addiction . I love them so much that I changed my degree from a Literature Degree to an Open Degree to accommodate EA300 Children’s Literature with The Open University.
Gyo Fujikawa is the most addictive for me. Children in paradise. Waving from tree houses. Gentle fairies and children no bigger than polka-dot toadstools. Captivating. But, there's the loneliness of the child with no one to play with except a frog. That saddens me. I was a lonely child and I empathise.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-gyo-fujikawa-drew-freedom-in-childrens-books
Then there’s Astrid Lindgren’s The Children of Noisy Village. I’m a Swedophile who can speak a few words of Swedish and I am in awe of the beauty and setting where the tale is filmed. An age of innocence. Swedish village life that will never return, perhaps.
https://tv.apple.com/no/movie/the-children-of-noisy-village/umc.cmc.13bmjs0xgg1sv8sju2tv3za5j
There’s the Portuguese word that best explains my longing to enter a world that these stories encapsulate, Saudade, a longing or nostalgia for something that cannot be realised.
I guess the reason such stories appeal is the desire to escape mentally from this broken world. C.S. Lewis wrote:
“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
Interesting, but what world did C.S Lewis mean? Did he mean the world of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? No, he was a Christian and an academic who wrote children’s books, Christian, apologetic and academic books. The world he was thinking of was the world recorded in Luke 23:43 “Truly I say to you today, you will be with Me in Paradise.”
Writing: © 2024 Jim McCrory