Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
--John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
(the poet’s reaction to reading a new translation of The Odyssey)
In Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, a troubled young woman finds a reason for living as a result of a life-affirming discovery among books in a library. There is an episode in Jasper Fforde’s extraordinary time-and-space odyssey Lost in a Good Book in which the narrator also makes an unusual discovery in a library. The books on the shelves “felt warm to the touch,” she tells us. She presses her ear to the spines. “I could hear a distant hum, the rumble of machinery, people talking, traffic, seagulls, laughter, waves on rocks … distant thunder, heavy rain, children playing, a blacksmith’s hammer—a million sounds all happening together.” Then, in what she calls “a revelatory moment,” she understands what the sounds are telling her: it is “the very nature of books” not merely “to give the impression of reality”: each one of them “was reality.” These books, she confides, in awe, “were alive!”
Of course, if we remember our own childhoods, this should not come as a surprise at all. It is in the trusting nature of childhood to be drawn by story, by the power of words, whether read aloud by an adult, or silently by the child herself, into what the poet Keats called, in his famous sonnet above, ‘realms of gold,’ mimic imaginary kingdoms created by writers and poets, worlds which often seem to the attentive listener or reader more real than those of familiar everyday activity. The names of these magic realms are legion: Alice’s Wonderland, Peter Pan’s Neverland, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Lewis’ Narnia, Dorothy’s Oz. Getting there is half the fun: falling down a rabbit hole leads to Wonderland; flying by tornado gets you to Oz; and a magic carpet to the land of Aladdin. Making a passage through the coats in a wardrobe leads to Narnia, while a flight through the air with a snowman leads to the North Pole. These happy escapist experiences, full of awe and wonder for impressionable children, are recalled with fondness when they become parents and grandparents themselves. “Who doesn’t approve of escape?” asks Francis Spufford, who answers himself, “Jailers, that’s who.” By story we can all be “lured away from the little world of the self into whole galaxies of the imagination,’ says the writer Gita Mehta. Ursula Le Guin continues, “There have been societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” Spufford has chronicled his own “life in reading” in his memoir The Child That Books Built, in which he recalls being so moved by the lion Aslan’s guardianship of the children in The Chronicles of Narnia that he gently kissed a picture of Aslan on the nose, so real was the lion for him.
