A baby never gets tired of playing peek-a-boo. No matter how many times you cover your eyes, the baby feels excited tension, even though he isn’t able to name his suspense about whether or not he’ll see your face again. No matter how many times you pull back your hands, the child will have exactly the same reaction: delight, relief, and pure happiness.
This fades as we grow up— mostly as a defense mechanism. The joys and sorrows of adulthood and (I shudder to think of it) adolescence would be far too much to handle if we didn’t temper this childish existence-in-the-moment with grown-up sense of coping. Still, it has always surprised and saddened me how quickly I become jaded. Some days I look up at the clouds and wonder when was the last time I noticed their shapes, or listen to a bird and wonder why I’ve been tuning out the sounds around me, or feel the soaking cold as I walk and wonder why I’m surprised to take note of it.
Our mind figures out and organizes what is “normal,” and we live with that filter turned on far too often. Sometimes we need a kick, a breath of the hills and forests of Faërie, to help us see the world around us. As Tolkien says:
We do not, or need not, despair of drawing because all lines must be either curved or straight, nor of painting because there are only three “primary” colours. We may indeed be older now, in so far as we are heirs in enjoyment or in practice of many generations of ancestors in the arts. In this inheritance of wealth there may be a danger of boredom or of anxiety to be original, and that may lead to a distaste for fine drawing, delicate pattern, and “pretty” colours, or else to mere manipulation and over-elaboration of old material, clever and heartless. But the true road of escape from such weariness is not to be found in the willfully awkward, clumsy, or misshapen, not in making all things dark or unremittingly violent; nor in the mixing of colours on through subtlety to drabness, and the fantastical complication of shapes to the point of silliness and on towards delirium. Before we reach such states we need recovery. We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses— and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make. In that sense only a taste for them may make us, or keep us, childish.
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