The British author P. L. Travers, famous for her Mary Poppins books, wrote many other works for children and several nonfiction titles as well. Among the latter is her About the Sleeping Beauty, and there, in an afterword appended to her own version of that traditional story, Travers makes this arresting observation about her “love for the fairy tale”:
It began in me quite early, before there was any separation between myself and the world. Eve’s apple had not yet been eaten; every bird had an emperor to sing to and any passing ant or beetle might be a prince in disguise. This undifferentiated world is common to all children…. But the grown-up view of things-as-they-are, limited as it is in dimension, lit by a wholly rational sun and capable of explanation, is different from that of a child. For a child this world is infinite, the sun shines up from the abyss as well as down from the sky, the time is always now and endless and the only way to explain a thing is to say that it cannot be explained.
I was asked recently what value there was in learning another language. The question was posed seriously, not in scoffing at those who take the trouble to learn syntax and vocabulary when online translators are easily at hand, but in wondering honestly about the purpose of learning to read and speak and write a language not natively one’s own. Why isn’t our first language enough? I gave the question some thought, pulled down a philosophical discussion about it which only lead into thicket, and then, looking for something else entirely, I saw Travers’s work fall open on the table. From singing birds and princes in disguise to a grown-up view under the rational sun—what could all that have to do with the value of acquiring some facility in another language?
Nothing more and nothing less than that we are human by virtue of language and we each are the human we are by virtue of the language we speak. Which means that if we can use another language, we might be able to give ourselves a way to become someone else for a time. That adult world of naming and causing, effecting and affecting, that sophisticated world lit by the light of the mind where everything has an explanation—how is that world created but by words and syntax, which are not universally identical but grown and shaped in local conditions and historical events? The language we each are raised up with is truly our world, but if we take the trouble to learn a different language, we travel to another place, remaining ourselves in our central awareness of being, but dispossessing ourselves of all the peculiar ways of seeing the world which our first language determines and restricts. And inevitably so, because form, linguistic or otherwise, delimits possibilities in order to make something—make us—peculiarly what it is.
But those singing birds and beetle princes? Well, they are not part of our adult rational world, but still they are real, or so at least said those cultures (and so say still those children) that understood in their innocence (the word means unhurt) the inherent constriction of the rational. For when we name some object or event in our world (and what is language if not a collection of names), we make something what it is by saying in effect what it’s not. That’s a coffee cup next to me there, so don’t think it’s anything else. I’ve rationed it off, sectionalized it from the rest of experience by virtue of that word cup—and that is what we mean by a rational world: clear-cut and defined, permanent and explainable, reliable and real.
But not really. All that definition and permanency could very well be an illusion—not a delusion, but an illusion, a playing at (the original meaning of the word). And how do we know that what we call the real world might be an illusion in this etymologically proper sense? Well, all we have to do is try to bring before ourselves something which always was what it is now and which will always be so. But we will look long and far for such a perduring thing. And the realization that we’ll never find such an object then puts us in quite a curious place: that the imaginative world of the fairy tale just might itself be an articulation of an abiding world where anything, as in the dreams which will come to us tonight, is possible, while that grown-up world, made firm and sure by language, is the ever-changing place of play and pretense: for how can anything or anyone pretend to last forever? To believe otherwise is what the ancients called hubris, and it is the fraught dream of the powerful then and now.
But that is what language does and must do: set the world up as a stage, believable for a time, but thankfully not believable always. And if we can command, to some working degree at least, another language, modern or ancient, we get a ticket to go to another play and see how those actors, those nouns and verbs and all they do together, make appear real what surely—just look around—will not last. All the world’s a stage, said, of course, Shakespeare, and all the men and women merely players. There is no performance without language, and every language will perform the world differently. So another language is another conceptual costume whose colors and folds and decorative buttons give us another character to watch—or even to play ourselves—while we look day by day for the really real.
Most importantly, then, it is language which keeps us awake—something priceless indeed. But is there an edge to language and its wakefulness, a border past which the nouns and verbs of any language have no literal reference? Do we eventually reach a point in our mindful landscape where the linguistic sign turns into shimmering symbol? At the conclusion of her afterword about the story of Sleeping Beauty, Travers makes this enchanting point:
Are we dealing here with the sleeping soul and all the external affairs of life that hem it in and hide it; something that falls asleep after childhood, something that not to waken would make life meaningless?
Well, if that is true, then in learning another language we might be dwelling closer to that border and hem of all languages, beyond which lies, so fairy tales and poetry and music intimate, something so real that our waking, rational, linguistic life—just like those plays we watch on stage—is but a purposeful illusion.
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A remarkable twist here.
I recently read Borges, who wrote in Spanish, but I read in translation.
Magical realism challenges the rational, somewhat like Travers.
From Cervantes and Quixote to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and 100 years of solitude is a remarkable arc.
About the former Borges wrote, “ for both the dreamer, and the dreamed, that entire adventure had been the clash of two worlds; the unreal world of romances and the common everyday world of the 17th century.”
But which is the border and hem of the illusion?
This is beautiful. Thank you.