Like An Onion

I began reading At the Back of the North Wind this afternoon. People don't write this sort of stuff anymore - not since Lewis. We simply don't see unaffected, multilayered, mature 'faery stories' (as Tolkien called them. Indeed for a number of reasons this term is preferable to 'fantasy') written for either children or adults these days. Why distinguish anyway? Obviously there are some stories that it would be unwise to give children, but there should be no good childrens book that's 'off limits' for Grown-Ups. The whole child/adult dichotomy is a sad one, because authors think that they'll do best by condescending to younger minds - and older readers avoid books crafted for kids because they'd consider it 'immature' or 'below themselves'. Lewis once said that a good childrens book should be able to be read at 8, at 18, and at 80. By those standards (high, but not unrealistic) there's not a lot of good stuff around. A good book is like an onion (or an ogre): it has layers. And the outer layers aren't inferior to the inner. They're just different. A child will percieve the initial layer, and that's wonderful and sufficient. If (not as) we grow and become more mature we will begin to discover more layers that don't invalidate or 'outmode' the first, but rather complement it. The first reading wasn't incomplete or wrong - it was a beginning. Life's the same. When a child looks around and declares that everything is quite simple, they're right. And when a philosopher says that there are wheels within wheels, they too are right. But the important thing is to start at the beginning. For a beginning, as the North Wind pointed out, is the greatest thing of all.