It happens every time. I read a book I love. I begin planning in my mind how I will tell this tiny space about it. As I go through my ordinary days, I begin to build a house of words, explaining my thoughts and feeling about this book. Then I sit down at my computer, staring at the blank document that will be my blog post. All at once, I notice the crooked wall in my mental house. The clunky sentence pretending to be a door, the bad simile, a cracked roof.
And I become afraid. Afraid what I write won’t be, can’t be, as good as what is in my mind. Maybe I won’t get my point across. Maybe people will be confused, maybe they won’t like it. After a long moment, trying to summon up the courage to write it all down, I close my computer and walk away. Too scared to share my thoughts.
I say this because I need to say it. I confess this fear in hopes of conquering it. Also, in writing this I am summoning up the courage to write about this book, to explain how much it means to me. Courage, don’t fail me now.
Phantastes, by George MacDonald
I picked up this book because C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite authors, loved it. He talked about it so highly I decided I wanted to give it a try. After waiting for months to get it from the library, it finally came.
At first, I read it with one half of me apart from the story, a step away from what was happening in the story. I watched for the themes, made predictions, tried to find out why Lewis loved the book so much. It starts with a young man having an encounter with a fairy, and finding his way into fairyland.
Here I am, reading along, watching for I don’t know what, critically following this characters journey. I know fairy stories, I am confident I know what will happen next, how his adventures will spring upon him out of nowhere.
Rather, the adventure sprang upon me. Soon after the character, Anodos, arrives in fairyland, he meets a woman who has flower fairies in her garden. He watches them play and tease each other for a long while. Like light bursting in on a dark room, I remembered my childhood obsession with flower fairies. I was in charge of the garden as a young person, a tiny one with mostly flowers, and I half believed it had fairies in it. I built little houses for them, and kept my eyes wide open to catch a glimpse. I never saw one, but the tiny garden was beautiful to me because of the unseen mystery.
From that moment on, the book immersed me. I did not read it to analyze, I read it to experience the adventure. With every page, every chapter, the book drew me in to fairyland. Back to the place I had found as a child. When I looked up at the world around me, I saw it as I used to. Fairies peek out from flowers and around rocks, and doors to other lands are just over the hill.
The world became mysterious and beautiful once again. I explained it to my husband this way. It is as if a part of me that slumbered for years, has been woken up again. The book woke me up.
This is not to say I now believe in fairies and spirits and magic. But to say there is a certain magic in the ‘what if’. The ‘what ifs’ make me pay attention to the world outside of my routine, outside of my mind. This world is beautiful, and I will miss it all if I don’t look up and take notice of it.
As children, it is all new and wondrous. As adults, it is easy to take for granted what we see every day. Such as rocks, mountains, clouds, and trees. Those things do not lose their beauty, but rather we begin to lose our sight of it. But sometimes, something comes along to wake us up and forces us to see what was in front of us the whole time.
Yes, I enjoyed the story, the characters, how the plot kept me on my toes. The themes at the end I am still considering and mulling over. But it is the perspective it gave me that I will remember for a long time afterwards. I cherish my awakened perception of this glorious, beautiful world. I know now it can slumber, and dull my sight. So I will do my best to keep it awake within me, and pay attention to what was always in front of my nose.
Shaina Merrick
The Beauty of a Story 