Once Upon a Wardrobe

by Patti Callahan Henry

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

“Ah!” Mr. Lewis leans forward. “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.”

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. And then my feeling—or was it a knowing?—is gone. I am back in the winter light, and I realize that maybe this was what Mr. Lewis was talking about with his biscuit tin and with Squirrel Nutkin and with nature. I suspect he understands that joy, that sudden longing or knowing that comes and is gone so quickly. I want it back. I want it back as badly as Edmund wanted more Turkish delight.

During those long afternoon walks in nature he came to believe that one must shut the mouth and open the eyes and ears, for nature only asked of him to look, listen, and attend.

Here, there is no wardrobe to walk through, but an oak desk is a portal to another world.

“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.”

because by now he understood that all books worth loving were worth rereading over and over.

“That is the question I get all the time. What I did when crafting this tale, Miss Devonshire, was to suppose that there was another world, and God entered it in a different way than He did here on earth. And so there you have Aslan. It’s a supposal, if you will.” “A supposal. What’s that?” “Something supposed, an idea of another world. And if there was this other world, how would God show Himself?”

“We rearrange elements that God has provided. 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.”

“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.”

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.

As the Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue once wrote, “A book is a path of words which takes the heart in new directions.”