When C.S. Lewis wrote “but some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
When I read this age 6 I didn’t understand it at all. I didn’t believe you could grow out of fairytales. Age 24, I understand it now. It’s not about growing out of fairytales, but discovering them once again, and fitting the last piece into a puzzle you didn’t quite know you were trying to solve.
At some point, sooner or later, the grief of the world hits you like a sledgehammer, and you’re left reeling and hollow. Everything is wan and grey, beaten down and hard, cruel and senseless. You are unmoored, so you go back to what has moored humankind for the millennia that our species has defied death to survive - you go back to stories.
You go back to the heroes, the knights and the castles, the brave stable boys with naught to their name and the villainous sorcerers that can be outwitted by guileful princesses. You go back to magic. Fairytales remind you of when the world was new (to you) and the boundaries of belief did not exist, for magic was in the everyday, equal parts ordinary and extraordinary. You recover what was lost.
I get it now, Jack. I get it.
And those same stories you read when you were 6 are still there, with their stableboys and scheming wizards. You get the nostalgia for going back to a story you loved, and a brand new magic- escapism, that you never knew you wanted from this story.
The story is the same. It is you who have changed. And what you get out of the story is up to you.
