Once Upon a Wardrobe

by Patti Callahan Henry

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.

“This is different. 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.”

“He’s the nicest man in the world. He talks . . . so precisely. I don’t know how to explain it. Like every word is exact and he means each one.”

“‘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.’”

Jack actually enjoyed Latin and Greek, but he loved staring out to the wild Irish countryside and finding more Boxen stories in his imagination.

I never want to stop learning.”

Jack read the quote for August 23, 1908: a line from King Lear: “Men must endure their going hence.” Jack stared at that line, one he knew from his Shakespeare lessons, a phrase that was as true as anything he’d ever read. He wept for his lost mother.

“It’s okay, Megs. It’s part of the story. There’s lots of parts to a story.”

He longs to climb inside the wardrobe and watch the story come together just as it happened. He doesn’t want to change the author’s life; he wants to watch it turn into something new,

“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.”

He shoves the wardrobe door wider, so we are face-to-face and the light from the lamp across the room shines in his eyes.

George takes something of this world and travels to another, as if the story world and the real world run right alongside each other. Or maybe they are inside each other.

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.

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

the silence of that truth, the connection that reaches through time.

Life is unfair; it’s not the story I would write for myself or for my family or the world.

I’ve heard that within are secret tunnels and leather-bound treasures.

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.

It felt like an echo of a song he’d heard but forgotten.

“So maybe his imagination is in both places while he writes both books, real and made up, and they crisscross.” He closes his eyes and sees the stories, words weaving over and around each other, fashioning a net of a story to catch him in. “Like a web, all those stories making another story, flowing in and out of one another.”

I had hoped to show you, and show George, how our lives unfold in so many different ways. How our individual stories become part of something much bigger.

My story all began with a picture. One day when I was sixteen years old, I imagined a faun with an umbrella carrying packages in a snowy wood. Then, on another day when I was in my forties, I decided to write the story that went with the picture.

Writing a book is much less like creating than it is like planting a garden—we are only entering as one cause into a causal stream that works, so to speak, its own way.”

“Most likely.” “I

Dunluce Castle is not just a pile of old stones on emerald hills. It’s an ancient whisper of Ireland and her stories. It’s the seed of a story where a great lion appears, and it is the symbol of my brother’s bravery. It is much, much more than a pile of old stones.

“I think the lion follows all of us around. We just have to look for him.”