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I
added a new header to the site as well as some words by C.S.
Lewis. I know they are unreadable for most human eyes but I am
adding this entry so you can read his words:
...Do
fairy tales teach children to retreat into a world of wish-fulfilment -
fantasy in the technical psychological sense of the word - instead of
facing the problems of the real world? Now it is here that the
problem becomes subtle. Let us again lay the fairy tale side by
side with the school story or any other story which is labelled a
Boys Book or a Girls Book, as distinct from a Childrens
Book. There is no doubt that both arouse, and imaginatively
satisfy, wishes. We long to go through the looking glass, to
reach fairy land. We also long to be the immensely popular and
successful schoolboy or schoolgirl, or the lucky boy or girl who
discovers the spys plot or rides the horse that none of the cowboys
can manage. But the two longings are very different. The
second, especially when directed on something so close as school life,
is ravenous and deadly serious. Its fulfilment on the level of
imagination is in very truth compensatory: we run to it from the
disappointments and humiliations of the real world: it sends us back to
the real world undivinely discontented. For it is flattery to the
ego. The pleasure consists in picturing oneself the object
of admiration. The other longing, that for fairy land, is very
different. In a sense a child does not long for fairy land as a
boy longs to be the hero of the first eleven. Does anyone suppose
that he really and prosaically longs for all the dangers and
discomforts of a fairy tale?-really wants dragons in contemporary
England? It is not so. It would be much truer to say that
fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and
troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of
something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or empyting the actual
world, gives it new dimension of depth. He does not despise real
woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all
real woods a little encharted. This is a special kind of
longing. The boy reading the school story of the type I have in
mind desires success and is unhappy (once the book is over) because he
cant get it: the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in
the very fact of desiring. For his mind has not been concentrated
on himself, as it often is in the more realistic story.
This
distinction holds for adult reading too. The dangerous fantasy is
always superficially realistic. The real victim of wishful
reverie does not batten on the Odyssey, The Tempest, or The Worm
Ouroboros: he (or she) prefers stories about millionaires, irresistible
beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches and bedroom scenes-things that
really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have happened if
the reader had had a fair chance. For, as I say, there are two
kinds of longing. The one is...a spiritual exercise, and the
other is a disease.
From Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, On Three Ways of Writing for Children by C.S. Lewis
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Oct. 2, 2005 - Untitled Comment
God Bless,
Gena Suarez, Publisher
The Old Schoolhouse Magazine
www.TheHomeschoolMagazine.com