G. K. Chesterton, Ants, and Wonder
When our eldest daughter was very young, we took her to the zoo. A fairly typical British zoo, it had meerkats and marmosets and wallabies and Sumatran tigers, to name but a few. It had enough exotic animals, in other words, to hold a young child’s attention for a long time. So, it was something of a surprise when she suddenly dropped down onto the path and called out in great excitement, “Look daddy: ants!”
I can’t remember how I reacted at the time but, looking back, I am now delighted at the memory. How wonderful it is that children find wonder all around them. There’s really no need for meerkats and marmosets when ants are walking across a dirt path!
And how sad it is too when children lose that sense of wonder. The world is such an awesome place and yet there is a danger that we all become dulled to these wonders over time. Worse still, we try to fill the gaps left by awe and wonder with rigidity and arrogance. We think we know all the answers and look down on others who don’t share our views.
So how can we maintain or rekindle that sense of wonder? And how we can we help our children maintain or rekindle it too?
Someone who might help us answer those questions is G. K. Chesterton, who (in Tremendous Trifles) famously argued that “the world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
Tremendous Trifles is certainly worth reading but I want to focus on another book, Orthodoxy, and specifically the chapter called ‘The Ethics of Elfland’ where Chesterton writes about the importance of fairy stories. One of the difficulties with Chesterton is that he is so quotable. I could quite happily fill this article with quotation after Chesterton quotation, but I’ll try to contain myself. Please bear with me if I get carried away.
Let’s start with this arresting observation:
When we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door.
Or, we might say, a child of seven is excited by meerkats, but a child of three is excited by ants. Later in the same chapter Chesterton takes this idea much further. It’s a longish passage for online reading but it’s so wonderful I hope you won’t mind my quoting it:
The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. 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 grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got 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. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.
Any parents who have read their child the same bedtime story for the 400th time - “Read it again, daddy!” - must feel the force of Chesterton’s argument. But what do we do if that vital sense of wonder is lost or fading? One answer, Chesterton suggests, is that we turn to traditional tales.
These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
It’s a wonderful notion (and yes, my rather repetitive use of adjectives is deliberate). Apple trees are amazing and yet we cease to be amazed by them. Rivers are astounding and yet we forget to be astounded. But fairy stories, by making the world strange, give it back to us again. They take us out of the humdrum, everyday reality and return us with our vision cleansed. We see again what was always there, but with our sense of wonder recharged.
And what follows naturally from wonder is gratitude:
The goodness of the fairy tale was not affected by the fact that there might be more dragons than princesses; it was good to be in a fairy tale. The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom. Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?
The language of rights - which certainly has its place - can perhaps blind us to the importance of gratitude. At the heart of life is a gift, and the appropriate response to gifts is gratitude not lawsuits. Or, as Chesterton expresses it later in ‘The Ethics of Elfland’, “life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege.” Let’s look at the whole passage:
Stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, "Robinson Crusoe," which I read about this time, and which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck.
I’d better stop there, though I could quite happily continue quoting G.K.C. all day long. I’ll hand over to you, dear readers, and hope you enjoy his books as much as I have. The only advice I’d give is to stick with it if you find his style disconcerting at first; my feeling is that the second half of ‘The Ethics of Elfland’ is greater than the first half. I also recognise that there is much more to be said about how to maintain or rekindle wonder in our own and our children’s lives, but perhaps I’ll revisit the idea in another post. Please do let make know if you have any suggestions or other thoughts on the matter.