Archive for June, 2010

Gems from Traditional Fairy Tales~Part 1

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

There are thousands of fairy tales from around the world. Recently I’ve been going through the “color” fairy books of my youth: The Red Fairy Book, The Blue Fairy Book, etc. I chuckled the other day when reading Andrew Lang’s introduction to The Green Fairy Book–the third in the series. In it he writes, “This is the third, and probably the last of the Fairy Books of many colours . . .” Of course, there are so many that followed after that collection, I imagined he only stopped because he couldn’t think of any more names for colors!

And I came across this terrific, profound remark: “There are not many people now, perhaps there are none, who can write really good fairy tales, because they do not believe enough in their own stories, and because they want to be wittier than it has pleased heaven to make them.”

That greatly touched my heart, as I hear the truth in those statements. I believe in my tales with all my heart. In fact, I pour my heart and soul so much into my tales that it took me by surprise, when I finished The Map across Time, to realize I had written my characters to reflect the two deeply integral sides of my soul. What Lang is saying here is a good tale (be it fairy or otherwise) really needs to be a tale the writer believes in. We bring our passion, our emotions, our dreams, and our fears to our stories. The best stories capture those sparks and set aflame a wood blaze. You can always tell when a writer has done that, and when they haven’t. As the famous line from Rich and Famous goes: “If your writing doesn’t keep you up nights, it won’t keep anyone else up either.”

At first I was enthralled and surpirsed by the call to write fairy tales. Not fantasy, but quite specifically, fairy tales. The more I read them, the more I see so many layers. Most were written to impart morals. Many reflect faith, belief in heaven’s watchcare and guidance. Some are a little over the top with extreme punishments, no doubt meant to serve as a scary warning to badly behaved children.

Lang claims many turn away from writing tales because they want to be “wittier” than a fairy tale will allow them to be. But, the sky’s the limit for wit and cleverness in fairy tales–perhaps even more so than in most other genres. Here’s a hilarious passage out of one tale in The Green Fairy Book that describes a king grieving the recent death of his queen:

“He shut himself up in a little room and knocked his head against the walls for grief, until his courtiers were really afraid that he would hurt himself. So they hung feather beds between the tapestry and the walls, and then he could go on knocking his head as long as it was any consolation to him without coming to much harm.”

If that is not witty, what is?

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Stranger in a Strange Land

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

“The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being,” Chesterton writes. “almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth.” This morning I felt like pondering on the universal loneliness we all feel. We’ve heard the expression, “no man is an island,” yet we do feel like islands. I heard a sermon the other day where the pastor said there are more people now living on the earth than have ever lived in all of history, and you would think because there are so many people out there, one would never be lonely. Yet, loneliness and feelings of isolation plague humanity more than ever before.

Here’s how Chesterton describes it, in his book The Everlasting Man: “Man has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. . . . Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter, as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. . . . It is not natural to see man as a natural product.”

This feeling we experience has no place in the theory of evolution. For, if humans developed naturally out of the natural world, there would be no strange sense of alienation. But God created us to know him, long for him, and to need him. He put a God-shaped hole in our hearts that nothing will plug except the intimacy gained with him. One of my favorite scriptures is in the book of Acts, chapter seventeen, where Paul tell the Athenians that God made out of one man all humans. And that He fixed both the length of years that they should live as well as the boundaries they would roam in–to what end? So that they should seek God and actually grope for Him, so that they would find Him–although He is not far off from each of us.

That is the source of our apparent loneliness. We are meant to be lonely without God, so we will grope for him. I love that word–so rich in image. As a blind man gropes for a wall or a table to hold onto. We are fumbling around in the dark, our hands outstretched, feeling the edges of a confusing, blurry world, longing for something solid and trustworthy to lean on. To rest in.

When I finished writing my sixth novel, Someone to Blame, I found myself returning over and over in the book to the theme of safety, and our striving to feel safe in a turbulent life that offers no protection from pain and suffering. How grateful I am to know God is holding me in His everlasting arms and that no matter what cliffs I fall off of in this life, He is there to catch me–faithful, true, loving, gentle, kind, merciful, forgiving. We will run out of words to describe Him long before He runs out of amazing qualities!

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Nature: “An Excited Repetition”

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

On to Chesterton, Part II: In Orthodoxy, Chesterton poses something I had never thought of before (imagine that!). He looks at the repetition inherent in nature and says, “the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape . . . . So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.” He goes on to say that nature seemed to be an excited repetition, “like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again.” Aplot indeed.

He felt as if God were trying to drill some understanding into his head. One of my favorite lines (which my lunatic Moon quotes in The Wolf of Tebron) is, “The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation.” He says the fingers of grass, the crowded stars, and the sun were clamoring to be noticed by way of repetition.

Now here’s what I find interesting: Some people, he states, suppose repetition signifies something dead, like a piece of mindless clockwork. “People feel that if the universe was personal, it would vary,” he says. But variation is due to dying and breaking down, losing strength, fatigue. Poetically, he states, “The sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life.” He compares this to children with abundant energy, kicking their legs in rhythm because of their excess of life. I love this:

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again,’ and the grownup person does it again and again until he is nearly dead. For grownup people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.”

Do we get this? What a concept! Listen: “But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God say every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun, and every evening, ‘Do it again,’ to the moon . . . . It may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” In summation, “The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.”

How many times have we watched a spectacular sunset and oohed and aahed as if it were the first one we’d ever seen? Earlier this week I saw a double rainbow in the sky, after a heavy rain, with the mountains and lake majestic behind it. I was awed to tears, even though I had seen rainbows like this a dozen times before. “Do it again,” I whispered. “Do it again and again.”

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