Once Upon a Wardrobe

by Patti Callahan Henry

“You’re rarely wrong, sister, but you are now. It’s not a children’s book. It might look like it on the cover, but it’s a book for everyone. Please, Megs. I need to know if Narnia is real.”

“But I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think the world is held together by stories, not all those equations you stare at.”

‘maybe someday you’ll be old enough to read fairy tales again.’”

Dad is so very in love with her, and each time she walks into a room, I know why. She possesses a light that everyone can see.

“‘Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills.’”

‘Reason is how we get to the truth, but imagination is how we find meaning.’”

I realize fantasy and imagination aren’t just for escape. And to dismiss them is absurd.

Because even with the dark parts and the light parts and the good parts and the bad parts, dinner must still be served.

“He told me his friend Mr. Tolkien says, ‘Myth-making is the art of the sub-creator.’

What if I read a book that made me fall in love so hard and so fast that I would search for more of its kind?

That’s when it happens, as it has never happened to me before when reading a story: time falls away as if it doesn’t exist at all, as if the cosmos holds still while I read. As if it waits for me to read this story. And maybe it does.

Maybe that’s why Mr. Lewis writes stories—to find a different way to tell a tale than has been told before. Or maybe that wasn’t why at all.

“You are ignoring imagination; you need it for your work too. But I can’t really understand my life without stories. They offer me . . . they offer all of us the truth in their myths, mysteries, and archetypes.”

“Maybe it’s not so much about finding the answers as it is asking the questions,” he says. “And using your imagination.”

There has been born in me a hope that one day Mr. Lewis will say something that will have me understanding all the pain and death and joy that seem to bump into each other in my life.

“Every life should be guided and enriched by one book or another, don’t you agree? Certainly, every formative moment in my life has been enriched or informed by a book. You must be very careful about what you choose to read—unless you want to stay stuck in your opinions and hard-boiled thoughts, you must be very careful.”

all books worth loving were worth rereading over and over.

There is a slide of disappointment when a self-told story doesn’t match what you encounter. But then there can also be a wonderful surprise when despair changes to rejoicing merely by turning around.

“Maybe because that’s what Edmund is like when he teases Lucy about finding Narnia. Maybe the cruel boy who tortured Mr. Lewis for not being good at football shows up in Narnia as Edmund.”

“Even if Christianity isn’t my favorite myth,” he told Warnie, “it’s the only one that is true.”

His illness is the White Witch. War is the White Witch. Cruelty is the White Witch.

“George knows you can take the bad parts in a life, all the hard and dismal parts, and turn them into something of beauty. You can take what hurts and aches and perform magic with it so it becomes something else, something that never would have been, except you make it so with your spells and stories and with your life.”

“Mr. Lewis’s kinds of stories—the fairy tales, the myths, the universes all wrapping themselves around other worlds—are inside ours.” I look to Padraig. “These stories make us remember something we forgot. They make a young boy want to hop out of a bed and see the ruins of a castle. These kinds of stories wake us up.”

“The way stories change us can’t be explained,” Padraig says. “It can only be felt. Like love.”

Although an author’s life and reading might inform a story in some ways, there are also large swaths of story-source that are altogether imaginative, mysterious, and transcendent. This is what I wanted to express.