BONUS ENTRY
There are times when in life that you fall so deeply and madly in love with something that when you come away from it a bit, you may think that your love for that thing was misaligned or that you misremembered it somehow. You may have found that you were too naïve or too young to really know a thing enough to love it. These doubts persist especially into middle age and you thought that did had not experienced enough to love so much and that the young are often given to exaggeration or infatuation so that the thing itself could be fine enough sure but then when reencountered you may not feel the same for it. It is a rare thing indeed to happen upon this put away thing that the same sense of joy and elation return to you as you experience something long forgotten anew. These are very rare things indeed. I had the experience to find two well forgotten things simply this, that I have loved them well in my youth and undergraduate days, but put those things away as I had not the time nor attention for them. The last 4 years have not been the time for fairy tales certainly though they honestly would have been perfect for them.
I watched, for the first time with my daughter, The Lord of the Rings movies and wept at the end for their beauty and truth. I will never forget the wonder of those films and this first watching. It was any dad’s dream to love something deeply and to have your children love it as well. I was nervous that she wouldn’t, that she would be too young, that she might not connect to the stories as sometimes women do not connect to male dominated things. She loved them in her own young way and that was a reward I do not feel like I deserve in this life. The other thing that I found that I loved very much some time ago but thought at this time in my life I might find it less pleasurable are the fairy stories of George MacDonald who at one time or another has been the master of my heart. I bought for my niece and nephew two books of fairy tales of his and thought to reread them in anticipation of their questions, and started with The Princess and the Goblin. I just recently finished listening to it on audiobook thanks to Libravox once again for a free version. Lizzie Driver was a fine performer for these words and was a pleasure to listen to on a rather stressful trip.
George MacDonald’s language is not captivating, at times it is a chore to get through but the genius behind the details he chooses to include and the deep sense of love you can feel in his words is a majesty that I do not know any other writer capable of. The words are halting and repetitive and difficult to get through. He seems not capable of the everyday mechanics of writers of his time, his voice seems alien even to Victorian authors that I have read. The beauty in his story is the details, the love of his characters and his witness to the realness of struggle even in the incidental.
The Princess and the Goblin follow the stories of the Princess Irene and the miner boy Curdie as they deal with the plight of the goblins on their lands. There is no heroism in this story of swashbuckling against the goblins btu that they have to outwit them in their strategy against them, the plan is foiled by a boy and at one point the king asks Curdie what he thinks is best. But the nature of the question here is faith, and it wasn’t simply that the thing was hard and you had to try, but the request that is presented to you doesn’t make sense to yourself at the time, you have to have faith to start to then have more faith later, and that is what is so simple about the issue at hand. A child is capable of this very easily, the girl is drawn quietly up the stairs. She knew that no one was supposed to be up there and she knew also that she didn’t have a great grandmother, but sometimes life is mysterious and beautiful and so she trusted this old spirit. She looked into the bath and it was the stars and moon and that it didn’t have a bottom, right then she is in, she saw something that was true in her spirit and needed no more to enter in. She is given the thread and it makes little if any sense and then she trusts that it will lead often not by sight, this is the simplest connection to the thing itself, she must feel her way through with the very thinnest of threads. Then she is lead out of the castle which makes even less sense but the directions remain the same. Then she finds Curdie and they walk back to the castle according to the thread. Then, after all of this the boy doesn’t believe her which is to be expected and it isn’t for want of trying nor for the drama of the retelling of the story, but it is only after he has to rely on the thread himself to “save” Irene that he fully believes and acts upon it. It is in the asking and it is in the testing that faith not only grows but happens at all. There is no faith with the asking, there is no faith without the doing. They simply do not exist. This is the logic of a dream.