Refreshing Reality

So…it’s been a while since I’ve given this blog a real update. The last few things I’ve posted haven’t even been real blog entries. In fact, I don’t think I’ve done a real blog in nearly six months.

So I thought I’d give it a shot.

I found a quote the other day by G.K. Chesterton. He said, regarding fairy tales, that “these tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember for one wild moment that they run with water.”

I really, really like that quote. In fact, I’ve made a little poster out of it and one of my many “found photos” that I come across—a digital painting of a cave in a desert, with sparkling blue water in the shadows—to hang over my desk. I love to think about that concept: that the magical nature of fairy tales and fantasy stories is merely a way to make us see reality with new eyes. Another quote, this one from a Michael Dirda in an article he wrote for the Washington Post back in 2002, says that “in most instances, fantasy ultimately returns us to our own now re-enchanted world, reminding us that it is neither prosaic nor meaningless and that how we live and what we do truly matters.”

I guess it’s kind of like the idea of meeting Aslan in Narnia. Remember, at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (both the book and the movie—off topic a bit, aren’t you glad that the movie-makers seemed to have mostly learned their lesson after the Prince Caspian fiasco? Dawn Treader was so much better.), where Lucy gets upset that she won’t be coming back to Narnia, and she tells Aslan that “It’s not Narnia, you know—it’s you! We won’t see you there.”

And Aslan tells her that he’s in our world too, she’ll just have to learn to know him by “another name”. (Again, off topic—I WAS SOOOOO THRILLED that that line made it into the movie. Like, so thrilled that I started to cry. LOL)

I think fantasy and fairy tales and make believe serve a couple of different purposes, but that they should never be “escapist” in the manner that so many people claim they are: just a way to avoid dealing with real life. They should be a…a sort of mirror, or window, in which we can see reality in a different way, so that when we return to reality, we are surprised anew with the freshness of real life. It’s like when you wear a pair of sunglasses—especially the colored ones—for a while. Or if you stare at something of one color for a long time. When you look away, or take off the glasses, the rest of the world has a sudden new vibrancy—if you’ve been staring at blue for a long time, the rest of the world is suddenly infused with red.

Fantasy and fairy tales stretch our imagination with images of dragons and mighty warriors and quests and evil lords so that when we land back in our world, we can be surprised anew with the realities of good friends, or favorite foods, or just the simple fact that it’s a beautiful day outside and we can feel the wind at our back and the sun on our face.

What do you think?

~Trav.