Turn Every Page: Recapturing Childlike Wonder
“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” That was a sign posted next to a Christmas-themed model train display that my family and I saw earlier this week. The men who built and controlled the trains were in their mid-60s. But their eyes were full of the magic and wonder of a child.
What if we had this same childlike disposition when we read books? What if “wonder” and “awe” were our first thoughts rather than criticism or utility? Early in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, he states that it is “through wonder men now begin, and once first began, to philosophize: from the beginning they have wondered at strange things which were near at hand, and then progressed forward step-by-step in this way, raising questions about greater matters.” Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b12-15. It is childlike wonder that leads us to question things, to make connections, and eventually to think deeply about things. But how often do we forget that initial feeling of wonder that we had as children?
My four-year old and I have been reading Charlotte’s Web recently. I read it as a child, but don’t have any specific recollection of doing so. It has been a privilege to capture a bit of that childhood wonder through my daughter. The characters come alive for her. Wilbur, Charlotte, Templeton—these have become part of her daily lexicon.
Until recently, I did not know that these characters were just as real for E.B. White as they are for my daughter. Around the time we started reading Charlotte’s Web, I started reading a collection of White’s essays. In 1948—ten years before Charlotte’s Web—White wrote about an experience on his farm in Maine in an essay, “Death of a Pig.” The essay sounded immediately familiar as it was about a spring pig destined for a winter slaughter: “The scheme of buying a spring pig in blossom time, feeding it through summer and fall, and butchering it when the solid cold weather arrives, is a familiar scheme to me and follows an antique pattern. It is a tragedy enacted on most farms with perfect fidelity to the original script. The murder, being premeditated, is in the first degree but is quick and skillful, and the smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned.” But then something happened. The pig that is the subject of the essay got sick and White was confronted with a dilemma. Does he allow the pig to die—because he was, after all, planning to slaughter the pig in a few months anyway—or does he try to save the pig?
The standard script for his spring pig had changed. “Once in a while something slips—one of the actors goes up in his lines and the whole performance stumbles and halts.” When White’s pig is absent for a meal, White becomes “cast suddenly in the role of pig’s friend and physician.” That unlikely role gave White the hands-on experience and material that became Charlotte’s Web. And when the pig died, despite his best efforts, White understood something more about the pig and about himself: “He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world.” (“Death of a Pig”)
Before reading his essays, I assumed White was a New Yorker who wrote for the New Yorker and only later decided to write children’s books. In fact, his story was far richer. In his book, The Story of Charlotte’s Web, Michael Sims explains how the introverted and nature-loving White found a world around him while living part of his childhood on a farm in Mount Vernon, New York. That love for nature extended through adulthood, and far from being a city-dweller, White spent about half his adult life on his farm in Brooklin, Maine.
It was on that farm that he wrote Charlotte’s Web, and that was where the characters developed before him. Charlotte, for example, was based on a real spider. White walked under the web regularly and admired its dew-covered brilliance in the mornings. He even stood watching as the spider spun its egg sac (which White later took back to the city, happily infesting his office with spiders).
The act of writing children’s literature changed White’s perspective. “Confronted by new challenges, surrounded by new acquaintances—including the characters of the barnyard, who were later to reappear in Charlotte’s Web—I was suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens.” (Sims 129)
In the Bible, Jesus tells his followers that unless you “become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (Mt 18:3) There is something about becoming childlike that opens new worlds to us. Perhaps that is why older people often become more childlike as they age. Not childish, but childlike—able to see the world from a simpler and, oftentimes, more real vantage point. Maybe that is why one of the most noteworthy Catholic theologians of the 20th century, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, wrote one of his last books, Unless You Become Like This Child (Ignatius Press 1991) (originally published months after his death in 1988), as an extended meditation on theological topics in light of Matthew 18:3. As we come to know things better, we also know them more simply, in their essence—in ways that would make intuitive sense to a child.
Charlotte’s Web consistently ranks as the best children’s book of all time in surveys of librarians, teachers, and others who regularly work with children. But perhaps it’s not just for children. Perhaps it, and White’s essays, are for all of us who have lost a bit of our wonder about the world around us.
As many people in the world prepare in the coming days to contemplate the wonder of a child in a manger, let’s remember the wonder and awe we felt when we experienced this holiday season as children, and when we first entered the awe-filled world of Charlotte, Wilbur, and their friends. And let us have that same disposition toward the rest of our reading, inquiring with wonder about the world around us, and the people and ideas that inhabit it.
Remember to turn every page. Enjoy your weekend. Please let me know whether you need anything.
Best,
Aaron