Once Upon a Wardrobe

by Patti Callahan Henry

Sometimes fairy stories may say best what’s to be said. C. S. Lewis

George once thought that if he lived long enough to be a grown-up, he’d have all the answers. Now he believes adults don’t know what’s what any more than he does.

I know you think the whole world is held together by some math formula.” His voice has an unaccustomed annoyance in it. “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.”

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.’”

“With stories, I can see with other eyes, imagine with other imaginations, feel with other hearts, as well as with my own. Stories aren’t equations.”

“Good stories introduce the marvelous. The whole story, paradoxically, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual world. It provides meaning.” “Yes,” Warnie says. “It takes us out of ourselves and lets us view reality from new angles. It expands our awareness of the world.”

‘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.”

You have taught me that talking and writing aren’t merely for chatter. They are, above all, a means to discovering the truth.”

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

“Trust me, I know. Advances in science will happen because of people like my father and you, but it’s not everything, you know? You can’t measure everything. And there is more than one way of understanding our lives.”

“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.”

This is war, just as Homer wrote about. The cold, the wet mud, the marching; it was what Jack had prepared for during his training, yet he was completely unprepared for the reality.

Bravery mixed with cowardice as idealistic and frightened young men fought for freedom, defining courage not by being free of fear but by fighting in spite of the fear.

“Believing in its importance and believing its facts are not the same. Myth conveys power. Myth gives import to the story. Myth guides us. Myths strike and strike deep. Myths have deep power over our human psyche. But that is not the same as being factually true. We all know that. We’ve all studied the Norse myths and the Celts and the Bible.”

“Myths show us the way the world should be, or could be, instead of how it is,”

Jack had known that his intellect stood over his imagination, that the two hemispheres, as it were, of his mind were in sharp contrast. He realized that all he’d loved, he believed to be imaginary, and all he’d believed was real, he thought grim and meaningless. Near dawn, Jack went home, and morning rose over the Kilns to see him a different man. Something within him had shifted. “Even if Christianity isn’t my favorite myth,” he told Warnie, “it’s the only one that is true.”

“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.”

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

Logic—it can’t help me in the soul things that matter.

maybe Narnia also began when Mr. Lewis sat quietly and paid attention to his heart’s voice. Maybe we are each and every one of us born with our own stories, and we must decide how to tell those stories with our own life, or in a book.” I stop and clear my mind, my heart, and my eyes. “Or . . . could it be that all our stories come from one larger story? Maybe Narnia also began before Mr. Lewis was even born in Belfast, Ireland. Maybe . . . Mr. Lewis’s tale already existed in the bright light where every story, legend, and myth is born.”

The bright lamppost light where all stories begin and end.”

Grief is the price I paid for loving fiercely, and that was okay, because there was no other choice but to love fiercely and fully.