As long as I'm dealing in honesty, I may as well admit that I have been more influenced (as a person) by my childhood readings of Tolkien and Lewis than I have been by any philosophers I read in college and grad school. The events and characters in Narnia and Middle Earth shaped my ideals, my dreams, my goals. Kant just annoyed me.
This is a great short little post on why bedtime stories are of upmost importance.
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2 comments:
funny and true! How are you feeling?! You are getting so close to the end. I'm due on Monday! We are praying for you guys!
Dear Mrs J- I hope you don't mind my lengthy supplement here.
I do the same as Wilson with Abigail. We make up bedtime stories & songs.
I enjoyed his son's imaginary being: giant, creeping Land Squid that only eats butterfly-unicorn-ballerina-princesses and puppies and girl dragons and can smell them anywhere and can't die and can magically transport itself after its prey and is always really, really hungry.
So as not to waste too much time/space...I suppose I'm reclaiming lost territory. Chesterton's The Ethics of Elfland is perhaps my new constitution vaunting over the fallen tyrants of scientism. You've probably read it (and know the Dougs are Chesterton fans, too). If not here's just a sample:
My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it from a nurse...the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things... Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense.
It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth.
I knew the magic beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon. This was at one with all popular tradition. Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush or the brook; but the singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists, and talked about the gods of brook and bush.
That is what the moderns mean when they say that the ancients did not "appreciate Nature," because they said that Nature was divine. Old nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that dance on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for the dryads.
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