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Adult control, however, inevitably tames the wild unpredictability of stories and pictures that come straight from each child’s imagination. Such illustrations, stories, and booklets give me almost unalloyed delight.
The occasional alloy is in the now inevitable stories that imitate electronic games, a more alarming instance of adult control. In these, the Catwings go through “a portal” into the middle of an incoherent adventure involving battles and the slaughter of enemies, monsters, etc., by the million. Evidently this is the only story the child knows. It’s scary to see a mind trapped in an endless repetition of violent acts without meaning or resolution, only escalation to keep the stimulus going. So far this kind of thing has come only from boys, which may be, in its way, a hopeful sign.
But the games of instantly rewarded destruction, in which the characters and action are ready-made “action figures” and the only goal is “winning,” are designed to be addictive, and therefore may be hard to outgrow or replace. Compelled into an endless, meaningless feedback loop, the imagination is starved and sterilized.
To have written a book is a very cool thing, when you are six or eight or ten years old. It leads to other cool things, such as fearless reading. Why would anybody who’s written a book be afraid of reading one?
When asked to talk about what I do, I’ve often compared writing with handicrafts—weaving, pot-making, woodworking. I see my fascination with the word as very like, say, the fascination with wood common to carvers, carpenters, cabinetmakers—people who find a fine piece of old chestnut with delight, and study it, and learn the grain of it, and handle it with sensuous pleasure, and consider what’s been done with chestnut and what you can do with it, loving the wood itself, the mere material, the stuff of their craft.
And right along with that, inseparably, I like the dances of meaning words do with one another, the endless changes and complexities of their interrelationships in sentence or text, by which imaginary worlds are built and shared. Writing engages me in both these aspects of words, in an inexhaustible playing, which is my lifework. Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood. Words are my magic, antiproverbial cake. I eat it, and I still have it.
But just as we once misused science to support the claim that animals are mindless machines, so now we misuse science to support the claim of knowing that nonanimal living things—plants—have no feelings. We know nothing of the sort.
I don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. I accept it. It isn’t a matter of faith, but of evidence.
The whole undertaking of science is to deal, as well as it can, with reality. The reality of actual things and events in time is subject to doubt, to hypothesis, to proof and disproof, to acceptance and rejection—not to belief or disbelief.
