When I saw the Chronicles of Narnia on the syllabus for this class, I admit I simply stared in disbelief. I first heard them read aloud by my mother as a six or seven year old. I think I read most of them again at various points in elementary school. And before this summer, I hadn’t touched a Narnia book since 8th grade, when I took an online literature class on the series. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about them much since then, except to remember, fondly and in frustration, how vastly superior they were to the movies that have come out over the last few years. I still have all seven of my hardcover copies on my bookshelf at home, and I suppose I had it in the back of my mind that I would read them to my children someday. I never even dreamed I’d study them in college.
Yet here I am, having turned the last page of The Last Battle for the fourth time, and now I’m supposed to write a journal entry about the experience. Trying to decide on a topic, I found myself mulling over all kinds of intellectual, scholarly angles to explore. Obviously, this time through the books I caught quite a bit I’d missed on my first three go-rounds. Which aspect of Lewis’s stories to critique and analyze with my newly acquired college-age brilliance? But somewhere in that process I started thinking about my previous experiences with the series. I started thinking about what it means to grow up with literature. When Lucy first encounters Aslan in Prince Caspian, they have an intriguing exchange that, not so surprisingly, meant little to me as a child:
“AsIan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”
“That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
“Not because you are?”
“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”
The Narnia books are like Aslan in this way. They have grown with me. Now I am big. And, like looking through an old diary, reading them has reminded me of what it was like to be small, and everything in between.
I grew up as a reader. By the time my brother Phil, three years my senior, entered preschool, I was already an expert at sounding out the first level of Bob Books. But truth be told, instrumental as Bob Books may be, they lack, shall we say, the substance of the kind found in more sophisticated works of literature. So at that young age, I more often discovered inspiration on the page by looking over my mother’s shoulder as she read aloud to the family, listening carefully to the words as I scanned the pictures and thereby forming a complete image in my mind. Hearing the same stories over and over, that image would often become so solidified that I could recall both words and pictures without the book in front of me, sometimes much to my parents’ amusement. Prime example: I could never understand, three year old that I was, their silent chuckles when I reached the line “uncircumcised Philistine” during a recitation of my favorite Bible story, David and Goliath.
As time went on, the books we read grew both in length and in words per page. Fear not, we didn’t just forget about such classics as The Story of Babar, Where the Wild Things Are, The Velveteen Rabbit, and countless others. But in addition to the odd storybook, my mother introduced us to the new and fantastical journeys of Dorothy and Toto, Laura Ingalls, the four Pevensies, and many others. These lengthy series not only captured my imagination—they held it every night for weeks and months on end. Gone, and somewhat sadly at that, were the pictures on every page. But I soon found that my mind was capable of making up its own. And here opened a whole new world—a world without limits, not confined to the page of a book, but as boundless and expansive as the depths of my imagination. I found that I was no longer an appreciative and increasingly sleepy spectator at our nightly literary rendez-vous. I became part of the stories themselves, walking along the yellow-bricked road, splashing playfully in the waters of Plum Creek, charging the ranks of the White Witch... all while lying enraptured on the carpet of the living room floor.
As I grew older and more confident in my reading skills, I would devour book after book in my free time in addition to my mother’s offerings. The sheer number of these volumes is a bit staggering; in just two months during third grade I churned through all 58 of the original Hardy Boys mysteries at a rate of one per day. The principle of “quality, not quantity” hadn’t quite sunken in yet. I would stay up hours after my bedtime engrossed in one epic narrative or other, even going so far as to use a shoebox with a peephole cut in it to hide my lamplight from my parents. I still have a whole bookshelf of those novels that played such a key role in my elementary school years, with such titles as The Golden Goblet, Where the Red Fern Grows, My Side of the Mountain, and The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. And I wouldn’t just read a book and put it behind me. The volumes that I particularly enjoyed I would reread three or four times, just for the heck of it. I also took pride in revisiting, “for myself,” many of the books I’d heard read out loud. I made many return trips to Oz, Narnia, and the early American frontier.
I adored those stories. They offered me an escape from my by turns uneventful and emotionally trying life as the peacekeeping middle child with three rather unruly siblings. I imagined I was the main character in these adventures, my favorite fantasy being that of a runaway with a pet falcon living off the land in the Catskill Mountains. Truth be told, I even contemplated hollowing out one of the hemlocks on our property in the woods of northeast Pennsylvania, moving in, and seeing how long I lasted. Some would criticize such role-playing as creating an unhealthy alternative reality to avoid having to deal with real life. And they could be right. But I wouldn’t trade those hours of running through the forest with my golden retriever in pursuit of an imaginary raccoon for anything in the world. To be honest, a part of me misses the blithe innocence of those afternoons of fanciful diversions all those years ago.
But grow up I did, and by the time I reached middle school I was hungry for more challenging fare. Indeed, by the end of 8th grade I had accomplished some rather ambitious literary feats, including but not limited to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Montgomery’s entire Anne of Green Gables series. It was quality, and not just quantity, I desired now. I have my parents and older brother to thank for providing a never-ending stream of “good books,” from those early childhood classics they read as bedtime stories to volumes they had themselves studied in high school and college, and, truth be told, handed over much more skeptically. This hunger for good, enriching novels continued all the way through sophomore year, and the titles I accumulated on my bookshelf are far too numerous to list.
When I reached junior year, I left home and with it home school, making the transition to boarding life at a college preparatory school in Stony Brook, Long Island. At the Stony Brook School, I found I didn’t have to ask for books. I was kept more than busy enough with required reading for English class. Not that I was complaining—thanks to my teacher Mr. Morley, I was now given the opportunity to not only read great literature, but to learn to discuss it and write about it as well. The time of role-playing was long over, but a new sense of excitement came from the analysis of books that I couldn’t just read, that I had to actually work to understand. From Shakespeare to Milton to Dickens to Waugh, we students in Honors English 11 looked beyond the plot to the themes that lay beneath—and I, simply by paying attention, became a fuller person because of them. It was this class, reinforced by Mr. Johnson’s excellent AP English course the following year, that made me want to be an English major.
But my love for literature started far earlier, before I knew what “analyze” meant, before I’d any idea who Frank L. Baum or C.S. Lewis were, back when I thought English and American were two distinct languages. Whether I knew it or not (and I didn’t), those books I read as a child taught me more about humans and human nature and the nature of the world we live in than any science or history class I’ve taken since. If I’ve taken anything from this last visit to Narnia, it’s a profound sense of gratitude to authors like Baum, Lewis, Milne, Grahame, and so many others who deigned to apply their brilliant minds to the creation of children’s stories that are profound enough to affect their young readers, often for life, without them even realizing it. Lewis once said, “A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.” If that’s true, and I think most would agree that it is, all I can say after this rereading of his Chronicles is that his children’s stories are some of the very best.
