Making Magic

I read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett yesterday (published in 1911). I had polished off The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908) a couple days earlier.  Both are commonly defined as “children’s literature” and never have we needed them more. With the occasional exception of Toad’s forays to recapture Toad Hall from the shoats and weasels, Wind in the Willows is remarkably free of any taint of violence - even those skirmishes produce only bumps and bruises, no one actually dies. The Secret Garden is a prototypical green novel, perhaps the archetypal example of the genre. For those of you who haven’t engaged in this joyful read in a decade or more, in The Secret Garden, a group of preteens employ the “Magic” of the renewal of spring growth in a long neglected garden to restore the physical and emotional health of two of their “secret group.” Their recovery is facilitated by a new, unexpected, powerful identification with, and appreciation of, the flora and fauna living in the garden.  The transformation is most obvious in the character Colin, who largely through what he identifies as the “Magic” of the garden, transitions from believing he will soon die, to the firm conviction that  “I am going to live forever!”

And what, you might ask, has turned my attention to these two “children’s books” from the previous century? Not really a difficult question. The motivation for this double dose of kiddy-lit Valium is the recent horrific dosage of the murder of school children here in America. Aside from the fact that the guns in the most recent bouts of carnage were purchased “legally,” the other common element appears to be that the murderers believed that they were acting from a position of moral certainty and that their victims represented a threat to a preferred society anchored in their own moral certainty.  I have also recently watched a couple of documentaries on Curiosity Stream about the rise of Hitler and fascism in the early decades of the 20th century. The parallels between the fascists of history and our current domestic crop are obvious.

I find it sadly curious that my two comfort children’s books were written as the world was sliding towards the “war to end all wars,” which turned out to be anything but.  Still there is, I do believe, an ethical component to existence. But I am much less sanguine regarding the notion that we have stumbled upon it.  Louis Pasteur said "Chance favors only the prepared mind."  While he was addressing the necessity of preparation in scientific investigations; I would assert that it would not distort the axiom too greatly to consider its application to ethical and moral considerations: Ethical and moral clarity favors only the open mind.  I view with significant skepticism those hucksters, religious zealots, and politicians on the right and left fringes who assert they have found the “truth” and conveniently close their minds to options and ideas they have yet to encounter or consider.

The comfort I draw from both Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden is that they both, perhaps naively, take place in a world where compassion and gentility are more valued than power and coercion. True, it is a world seemingly alien to the one in which I actually live, but then the great religious and philosophical texts of our civilizations also seem to depict realities still seemingly beyond our grasp. 

An interesting experiment. Contact your representatives in Congress and inquire about their feelings regarding the state of current gun legislation. If they assert that current legislation is sufficient, you will have learned two things about them; one a probability, the other a certainty. The probability is that their election campaigns are supported by meaningful contributions from the NRA (the National Rifle Association, for those of you lucky enough to reside beyond their nefarious influence.) The certainty is that they are wrong. If they wish to cling to their belief that there is nothing amiss with current gun control legislation you might suggest that they visit cemeteries near to these locations:

ROBB ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

OXFORD HIGH SCHOOL

SANTA FE HIGH SCHOOL

MARYSVILLE-PILCHUCK HIGH SCHOOL

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA

SANDY HOOK ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

OIKOS UNIVERSITY

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY

VIRGINIA TECH

WEST NICKEL MINES AMISH SCHOOL

RED LAKE HIGH SCHOOL

COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL

There they will find the graves of the 169 students, from elementary school to college, for whom, since Columbine, the current legislation did not suffice.