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Scent of a flower we have not yet found.
Apr. 13th, 2009 09:09 pmOver the last few days, I've been finding torn pages from a copy of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe fluttering in the street, stuck in trees, etc., as well as page fragments from a Dragonlance novel. That tugs at me in an odd way. That, and belief in unicorns.
Elizabeth and I browsed through Youtube before bed. We watched the opening credits of The Last Unicorn, which she recently declared as the "best movie I ever watched!" This video led to clips of the unicorns from the live-action film, Legend. which prompted Elizabeth to say, "Unicorns are real? I thought they were make-believe!"
I replied, "I think they put a horn on a white horse, to pretend, for a movie."
She looked at me seriously, and said that no, she was very sure it was real. I said, I didn't think it was, and she did the little eye-roll thing that all children do to their parents, sooner or later.
I admit that I have no desire to press my six-year-old daughter on her belief in the existence of unicorns. It's a good world to live in, if it has unicorns in it. It put me in mind of C.S. Lewis, and his description of "sehnsucht."
"That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves..."
And, tying this all together, consideration of the fellow who committed suicide last week. Not a friend by any means. A friend of a friend, and someone I'd not met, who seemed to have dedicated his few years of adult life to trying too hard to hold on to something, a bent and battered vision of the "unnameable something" that ended up bringing him grief.
"These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."
The only way to go on, really, is to keep going on.
Elizabeth and I browsed through Youtube before bed. We watched the opening credits of The Last Unicorn, which she recently declared as the "best movie I ever watched!" This video led to clips of the unicorns from the live-action film, Legend. which prompted Elizabeth to say, "Unicorns are real? I thought they were make-believe!"
I replied, "I think they put a horn on a white horse, to pretend, for a movie."
She looked at me seriously, and said that no, she was very sure it was real. I said, I didn't think it was, and she did the little eye-roll thing that all children do to their parents, sooner or later.
I admit that I have no desire to press my six-year-old daughter on her belief in the existence of unicorns. It's a good world to live in, if it has unicorns in it. It put me in mind of C.S. Lewis, and his description of "sehnsucht."
"That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves..."
And, tying this all together, consideration of the fellow who committed suicide last week. Not a friend by any means. A friend of a friend, and someone I'd not met, who seemed to have dedicated his few years of adult life to trying too hard to hold on to something, a bent and battered vision of the "unnameable something" that ended up bringing him grief.
"These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."
The only way to go on, really, is to keep going on.
