Once Upon a Wardrobe

by Patti Callahan Henry

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

“So dreadful,” I say. “Yes.” He smiles. “There was a seventeenth-century mystic named St. Julian of Norwich. Have you heard of her?” “Yes, sir.” “She has written many beautiful lines, but the one that echoes through the world is ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’” “I don’t always believe that, sir,” I tell him. “So many bad things happen.” “Yes, they do and always will, and yet, all will be well.”

For a breath or two, I wonder about this magical world we live in. It’s a mystery we can never understand. For a moment, a small and breath-holding moment, I know it to be true: there is more, something more I can’t see, a vivid truth that can’t be described by logic or words alone, a truth that delights the heart.

Autumn approached the edges of winter, and Jack found a book of poetry by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, the pages drenched in Irish folklore.

In Twilight of the Gods, Ragnarök was a thrilling nonstop series of events that finished with the death of each god, and yet there were those gods who died and rose again.

a combination that made his stomach queasy and gave him a deep ache for his mother, the pain like a savage wound that would never heal.

Phantastes by George MacDonald.

Phantastes is the one that baptized his imagination.”

This whole town emerged unscathed from the war because the evil man Adolf Hitler wanted to preserve it for himself.

Dunluce Castle.

He wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress and The Great Divorce. He met with his writer friends, the Inklings, in a pub called The Eagle and Child—Bird and Baby is its nickname—every Tuesday between one and two in the afternoon.”

“So there isn’t one answer for each question.” “There rarely is, Miss Devonshire.” “I wish there were.”

“George knows you can take the bad parts in a life, all the hard and dismal parts, and turn them into something of beauty.

“And you’ve allowed me to see that we are enchanted not by being able to explain it all, but by its very mystery.