I just finished reading the first 0f C. S. Lewis' Narnia books, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, to my son Jonah. Jonah is about 16 months so he isn't necessarily getting a lot out of the story itself, though he seems to enjoy the cadences of speech. The first books I read him were the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in fact.
As I finished the first Narnia book I was struck by something that had impressed itself very vividly on me when I was a child and my own mother read the same books to me, from my father's old hardcover first editions (I think) that probably would be worth a little if we kids hadn't totally ravaged them (tho no amount of money, you ask me, competes with the value of the experiences it takes to really break in a well-made book ). If you're not acquainted or don't remember (and if you are planning to read them/see the movie and are the kind of person who is disturbed by having the endings of things revealed to you, this would be the perfect time to stop reading) one of the early elements of the Narnia universe is that when the children are in this magical other world, time stops, or barely passes, in our own, the ordinary, mundane, or (if you like) real world.
At the end of the book this device is taken to the extreme. After the main adventure is completed, the denoument is very fairy tale, happily-ever-after. Lewis tells how the children, now crowned monarchs of Narnia, grow into upright adults and great leaders, and it hints at their adventures in Narnia as adults (indeed Lewis returns to this era in Narnian history for one of the later books, The Horse and his Boy, where the children appear briefly in their "monarch" roles).
Then Lewis relates how the now-grown children, hunting the magical wish-granting white stag in the forests where they first entered Narnia, once again find the incongruous lamp-post that marks the doorway to our world through the wardrobe of the title, and out they tumble, at the same hour and day they originally left, returned to their youth, left with the memory but not the manner or true experience of the adulthood they have shed.
I remember that this idea very much captured my mind when I was but a wee lad. The idea of a magical land was exciting, and I wished and even hoped (without real expectations - a hopeless hope: I knew how things worked) that they could be real - not in a "it will always be real as long as it lives in the hearts and imaginations of children" way, but in a "holy shit, there it is" way.
The idea of the fluidity, ambiguity, and implications of the concept of time, though, I saw as something different. The implications stunned me. How I contrived to wish for more time when I was something like ten I can't tell you. I always was an introspective lad. I remember a particular night - I think it was a family camping trip, though it might have been some lesser expedition like a sleepover, I only remember for sure being in a tent - and I was lying not asleep but not quite awake, it was late in summer, and I thought, maybe this summer vacation has all been a dream, and I will wake up and it will be the first day of summer again. Not a blockbuster as speculative concepts go, suitable as a hackneyed device to cut off an unpopular plotline in an evening soap, the quintessential "oh fuck it" ending of any fantastical yarn. All just a dream.
But as is always the case it is the experience rather than the concept that embedded this more firmly in my memory. In that dream border state I believed the idea, felt it to be true. Felt its possibility, something I could willfully inhabit. Go into the wardrobe. To my recall the feeling passed, I fell asleep, and woke into the same timeline I'd lain down to: the Summer grown old. Who knows, really. I think at that time I also recalled a strange experience from very early youth, three to five, in which I woke up to a distinct impression that a considerable extent of experience, like three months, had been a dream. I couldn't tell you a lot more of the specifics, I could barely talk, it could all be itself a dream. I know memory is a liar: I caught mine out many times when I used to keep a journal (this was in the late eighties and nineties, kids, when we used to keep journals in things called books). I do recall that the impression of dreamdom was related in some way to pancakes.
Later I read something Ursula K. LeGuin wrote about jellyfish and I understood. These days I tend to go down that rambling road of thought by the more adult indulgence of regret, the price of freedom I once wrote, the intrinsically negative speculation on what might have been, if I'd studied computers instead of chemistry or had taken that last coding job from Estrin. It seems possible, within the confines of completely orthodox scientific opinion, to speculate that all possible realities exist. Perhaps we can only tune in on one track at a time, as our fragmentary merely four dimensional memory can only focus on the present moment, though past and future moments must in some sense exist. And do the fortunes of the population of the world suggest some sort of demographic graph of how the fortunes of our transdimensional counterparts fall?
this is what is up with this.
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