The Milk and Blood of Marriage

:And its Icky and Intimate Parts ad Portrayed in"The Time Traveler's Wife"

The time and place in which we read a book is hardly inconsequential to our perception of it. 

I first read The Time Traveler's Wife when I was a young girl. In many ways, I was too young to understand the novel. 

 

There is some perfect irony in this, I think. As I reread the novel for the second time, I realized things I had not before. I saw and understood the novel on a level that was far more personal. It was both more familiar and more disturbing than it was to the mind of my younger self. 

 

 

The novel's protagonist Clare experiences this same sensation within her own story. She meets her husband at the young age of 6 when he appears naked in the front yard of her house. Her husband Henry, a man who suffers from a disorder that helplessly displaces him in time (also causing him to leave anything material and otherwise behind, including his clothes), will not meet her until he is 28 and she is 20. 

 

Naturally, there are some things that Clare at the age of 6 did not understand about the strange time traveler who appeared for fragments in the meadow near her home. He is in many ways a perfect stranger with whom she slowly becomes perfectly familiar, first from the perspective of a child with an innocent crush, and then from that of a teenager who has other more sensational things on her mind. 

 

Rereading The Time Traveler's Wife now I realized that in reading this as a young imaginative girl I had dubbed it a mere romance. Thus, it lost both its strangeness and its ordinariness. Now I realize that this is not the story of two people who come together, bound by destiny and love. Neither is this a story of science fiction, the tale of a time traveler with a disorder made real in its fictional limits. 

This is the narrative of Henry and Clare who find themselves together from the start of the story, and though their lives are bound ever since that day when Clare was young and pink and innocent, they are constantly being separated, by time and space, and by each other. 

 

The imagery bestowed to the second part of the novel, titled a drop of blood in a bowl of milk, paints the perfect picture of how this novel makes one feel. There is both an ickyness and an intimacy to the image; for marriage, while beautiful and intimate, has its icky parts too. The bowl of milk in this portrait is something soft and pale and usually untouched, though nonetheless it is spoiled by a small drop of blood. In the same way, Henry and Clare's marriage is stained over time by grief, by frustration, and resentment, by an irritation with the things that keep them apart, and so an irritation with one-another. 

Love stories often forget how ugly marriage can be. It is lovely to dream of first kisses, of wedding days, and white dresses, and the perfect romance of two people finding each other in a chaotic world. But when stubbornness and dissatisfaction sears and scars a once white and perfect thing, it is easy to forget the purity it once held. 

In the end it is those images that linger; these are the details that make the novel memorable: the seared gaze of a grief stricken widower, eye whites shot and yellowed by excessive drinking; the red smudged lips of a woman discarded by love committing suicide alone in her apartment; glimpses of white bloodied sheets stained by miscarriage; blurry pictures of white crystal snow sullied with the blood of a deceased lover; all reinterpretations of that spoiled bowl of milk painted into its type-scripted pages.

The Time Traveler's Wife is a portrait of marriage, as raw and unflattering as it is idealized and filtered by fiction; and it is painted in milk and old spilled blood. It leaves neither out. Beginning with a perfect meadow and Clare in white knee socks, it shy's not from love's icky, messy, and gruesome parts by continually staining perfect white things with red and yellow blotches. 

 

 

It is a strange way to depict a marriage. Despite its elements of science fiction and literally disordered timeline, their marriage feels doggedly raw, at times as passionate as it is tedious and frustrating. But that is not the strange part: the strange part is that it is its un-ordinary details, its time travel and thus its disjointed and dislocated lives, that makes this marriage feel at all true and real.

 

After all, it is not only Henry's strange genetic disorder that keeps them apart. At times, it is their stubbornness. Sometimes, it is their own grief or personal lack, an internal dissatisfaction not even their supposedly perfect love can fulfill. 

Instead of locking himself in his study or going for a drive, Henry simply disappears entirely, escaping to some other time and space. Time travel is simply the medium, the perpetrator that makes an emotional separation literal in their marriage. In reality, such things are not necessary.

Clare, like myself, once thought that getting to Henry would be the end of it; the happily ever after, not in the sense that this is the end of their story, but in the sense that, in everything that comes after, they could be happy. 

This, of course, is not the case. Clare's deepest hurts and hardest times come after. She wept once about how lonely it was to wait for Henry. But this was before, when she still knew he would come and she still had the list he gave her telling her exactly when he would return. Later, she has only the unfilled clothing he leaves behind, and the empty time spent waiting and not knowing when he will return to her.

I myself used to think that being married meant that one never had to be lonely again. It wasn't that I actively believed this, but it was a coming disillusionment I sometimes faced snippets of. I remember a friend once telling me how lonely she was finding marriage to be. I tried not to think about it. Who wants to believe there is no perfect cure for loneliness, after all.

In this way, Clare doesn't learn what it is to be lonely until she is separated from he who is closest to her, not just by time and space, but by personal stubbornness, by internal struggles, and often trivial frustrations. 

Sometimes the space across one's bed feels further than time and space. Sometimes one feels as separated from their spouse as if they were a perfect stranger. 

But that is what marriage is about, is it not? Not that I've been married all too long, so perhaps simply take this as an insight about a book I recently reread. 

Marriage, according to this particular novel, is about time; about finding time; making time; losing time; savoring time; and yearning for more of it. It is about washing the blood out of your sheets; it is about not minding the yellowed time-stains on a once clean and perfect dress; marriage is about the messy bits more than the pretty ones, because, after the mess has been made, we only cling to each other that much harder.

 

At the end of the day, marriage is a constant losing of the other, for spaces and fragments, one or the other is gone for a day, sometimes for a week; not literally gone like Henry, but emotionally, mentally missing. 

 

Marriage is about finding your way to each other, again, and again, and again. 

Sometimes it feels like there is never enough time, like there is always something in the way, keeping you from one another; always another red drop in each new bowl you pour.

 

But the world is never as still and perfect as when you find your way back; when the space between two people suddenly falls away and all the worries melt from your mind. 

 

 

 

 

I suppose the real truth is that I, like Clare, did not think that once I had him I would still spend so much time trying to find my way back to him again. I did not think that so many date nights would be canceled; that we would agree to do our own thing most nights. I did not think I would spend so much time waiting for him to come to bed. For us, neither of us needed to be a time traveler for time to keep us apart.

My, oh my, marriage can be complicated. But sometimes, every once in a while, it is the most simple thing in the world. 

It just takes a little washing and a little time.

But that's why you promise a lifetime, I guess. And him and I, we still have it all ahead of us. 

I for one will make the time to get back to him every day for the rest of my life.

Dracula: The Diaries that Were Never Meant to be Read

(or) The Writing Puppeteer and the Surrogate Confessor

 

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula were written almost a lifetime apart. Yet the two novels are undeniably the most highly read books of horror ever to be written. 

 

This, to me, is no mystery.

 

Indeed, when one thinks of other renowned writers of horror, such as Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft, one usually thinks first of the author who penned them, not the names of their stories. It is not so for Shelley's Frankenstein and Stoker's Dracula. They are remembered mainly for their monsters, for the titles of their monstrous works, for the horrors that they penned within. 

Frankenstein's monster (widely and ironically called merely "Frankenstein") is a sapient creature created from dissevered human parts. Dracula, the most well known vampire ever written about, is an apparition of terror who feasts and sucks on other human beings. 

 

I trust I did not have to tell you that. You already knew who they were. Everyone does, after all. But it is good to be reminded just how ghastly these creatures with whom we are so well acquainted are.

 

While there is no denying that the grotesque and debase way human life is sucked, smothered, split, and severed in these works is utterly unsettling, there is another more horrifying detail. 

It is easy to be sickened by Victor Frankenstein's cowardice and self victimization. Even more so is it natural to detest and dread Dracula who diminishes naive young maidens to ghostliness and drives people into madness and terror. 

But, to do all this while also making the reader feel uneasy, not just with the plot itself, but with themselves, that is a narrative feat to be admired, even to be feared. 

Indeed, it is no coincidence that the two most engrossing tales of horror ever to be written adopt the same narrative style. These works are not tales, they are private confessions; they are the dreadful diaries of those who have gone to dark and dismal places and seen the diabolical; and, what's more, they were never meant to be read. 

 

 

This is, of course, not to say that the authors did not mean for us to read them. But the author is not the real teller of these stories, not in the fictional sense of the word. They are the executioner, the puppet master, and they have their ink stained hands inside another's mouth. 

 

Stoker is the singular master of numerous private diaries, confidential letters, and secret interviews. From Jonathan Harker, Madam Mina, Lucy Westerna, Doctor Seward and more, in Dracula, Stoker puppeteers these soul's private musing and secret confessions. He plays these puppets so perfectly, searing and tearing at them with his pen till the ink dots his pages, till the reader themselves can pretend in full that there is no author at all, just horrid utterances written by cursed characters who know not that their words are being read by a stranger.  

Shelley likewise has her own skill as a puppeteer, speaking in not one, but two mouths at the same time in a story told within another. In Frankenstein, Captain Walton concedes the account told to him by Victor Frankenstein on a near desecrated ship, trapped inside a frozen sea. 

One might say Walton had little choice but to listen to Victor Frankenstein's horrible account. He had no where else to go. He is locked by cold and ice just as he is by his human conviction, stuck in the clutches of curiosity and foremost, by a moral contract to listen to this distraught stranger's confession. 

Yet, the reader, having all the places to go in the world, finds themselves trapped in the same fate. From the stories first pages we are led on by the deplorable thread, the demoralizing idea that the teller has no one else to turn to. As we read the reiteration of Frankenstein's words through the mark of Walton's pen, we are implored to listen by the same means he is. We keep reading because we are curious; because our mind has been meddled with; for the narrator has claimed that there is horrible confession on its way, just ahead, on any one of these pages, and deep down, we would like to hear it to sate our secret curiosity. 

Thus, the reader is entreated to listen for the sake of the teller's soul in both tales. In Dracula as well as Frankenstein, we are not sure if the teller will make it out alive, and thus the horrible thought lurks always in the back of our mind that no one else will ever know that they are dead, or what it was that killed them.

 

 

 

 It becomes easy to see why the names of the author's, though remembered, become somehow detached from their works. The authors are admired once the book is finished, recognized when their names are spoken or their works are discussed. Yet, while the book is being read, the author becomes altogether irrelevant, displaced for the sake of terror and dismay. It is, after all, so much more terrible and thrilling to become enthralled and engrossed with the confession. 

Let us not ask the writer what their intentions are. Let us fear the monster instead. Let us forget that their is a writer pulling strings and attempting to shock. Let us be at their mercy. 

 

Of course, if we are to continue with this fictional pretense for the sake of good horror, it is also important to note that the confessor will never know that someone has read their words. It is a strange and unsettling thing to read the diaries of those now dead.

The tale of Victor Frankenstein, if we are to consider it further, is one confession inside of another. For as already stated, Victor Frankenstein tells his story to one more soul before he dies. It is captain Robert Walton, his first confessor, who writes down every word uttered by Victor Frankenstein on that cold barren sea.

I will not recount here the horrible things confessed by Frankenstein, only say that it is little wonder the tale haunts Walton so much so that he cannot but write it down, thus sharing the harrowing burden with the page and the reader's inquisitive eyes. 

Though naturally these words were never meant for us. Walton writes to his sister Margaret. It is to her that he confesses.

"What can I say that will enable you to understand the depth of my sorrow?" he asks. "All that I should express would be inadequate and feeble."

Yet there is no guarantee that Walton's words are ever read. No known response is ever received from Margaret, not a word is ever uttered by this surrogate confessor. Furthermore, the reader can never know if Walton ever reaches land and finds another soul to share in his burden. 

It may very well be that Victor's secret dies on that desolate sea, in which case the reader is the only one that knows.

Thus, Walton's story ends with the form of Frankenstein's monster disappearing across the ice into the distant darkness.

 

Famously, the story of Dracula starts with the diaries of Jonathan Harker in the weeks he spends at the castle of Count Dracula. It was in those weeks that his diary proved to be a source of solace; a soothing to his sanity in satanic places. He never imagined how vital this comfort would turn out to be. Indeed, he sometimes shudders to imagine that his words might be read by another.

Thus, when Jonathan confesses that he hesitates to note down the terrible things he saw because he fears that his love Mina might one day read it, what reader does not pause, if only for an instant, and wonder who gave them the right to read these private words.

It is a strange sort of sensation that feels faintly of discomfort, even disgust. 

 

It is true that a great many diaries are shared throughout the course of the narrative. It often seems that for the characters words do not suffice. In the rare occasion that horrors are repeated aloud they usually cause great distress. 

The reading and sharing of private writings throughout acts as a symbol of good faith, and what's more, as a more perfect truth. The accounts as they are thus laid out on the pages of their diaries are unaltered by doubt or misconceptions caused by reflections or reason. They are the raw reports of the senses and what came over them, sometimes written mere moments after the events transpire.

But there is another reason that the characters rely so on their diaries. It is a truth that every writer knows. It is simply this: a soul is easier shared on the page than in conversation. As Mina herself says, to write is both a listening and a whispering to oneself, and so, the soul is not disguised by such trifles as one's voice or actions. It is unaltered by the reactions of those they are speaking to. 

This is not to say that the characters are immune to the discomforts caused by such intrusions. Madam Mina, who becomes the guardian of their diaries as well as her own, says after reading one such account:

"I have been more touched than I can say by your grief...It told me, in its very tones, the anguish of your heart. It was like a soul crying out to almighty God. No one else must ever hear them spoken ever again!... none other need now hear your heart beat as I did."

Van Helsing upon requesting permission to read the diary of one recently deceased shares a similar statement, though his speaks even more directly into the reader's own ear. 

 

Upon assuring that he does not desire to read the papers for curiosities sake, he says, 

 

"I have them (the papers) all here. I took them... so that no strange hand might touch them – no strange eyes look through her words and into her soul."

 

If there is one thing to be taken from this it is that the reader is by all accounts a stranger, and that they have looked long and hard into all of their souls.

When Jonathan and Mina finally marry, Jonathan entrusts his diary to her, his wife, bidding her only that if she were to read it never to let him know it. 

 

Mina, of course, does not in that moment realize the gravity of her decision. She binds the book in ribbon and wax, a ribbon which she wore around her untouched neck, and she seals the wax with her wedding ring, recognizing it as a symbol of the trust they have for one another. 

 

The reader makes no such vows. Their eyes breach every secret, every concealment unashamedly. Thus, they become the invisible confessor that no one asks for.

Whether they are the one who breaks the seal or whether Mina does this herself depends on how you read the story. Maybe it is best to imagine that the story is already over and Dracula is just an old dusty diary and a stack of letters laced together with a blue ribbon once worn around a lady's neck. 

 

Surely, it is easier than watching it all transpire in silence. It is easier than intercepting every letter and stealing every diary in the dead of night just to keep up with the story. 

Certainly, it is easier than being the one to break the seal.

So the work of horror is put down and the astounded reader wonders at the puppeteer's skill, to write such a harrowing and haunted tale through the mouth of another, a mouth sewn by their own cunning hands. 

It is no longer clear who is the puppet: is it the characters? Or has the writer caught the reader in their strings? 

Stoker's Shadows

 "Though we were in shelter, we could hear the rising wind, for it moaned and whistled through the rocks, and the branches crashed together... It grew colder and colder still."

(Dracula, Bram Stoker)

It was a cold, blustery day; the cold was of the wet, bitter kind; the kind that seems to grasp your very bones. Not even the heat indoors could fight it away. You could feel it seeping through the glass of every window. 

 

 

The outside world looked dreary, blurred by the wetness and the damp, and the rain's slim slippery fingers tapped on my window eerily, sometimes almost desperately.

 

By the time the afternoon rolled in the day had changed its mind tenfold, turning itself from rain to snow, and back to rain again. By then the clouds above were as thin as a dying person's skin, and the light it let loose was pale and meagre. 

 

The day was almost spent.

As I read by the window, the shadows crept out from between the pages of my book, out of the core of its very spine. Even as I held it open, transfixed by its horror, still, the shadows lingered. I expanded its leaves, extending its spine and wrenching it wide. Still, the shadows deepened.

 

 

 

 

 Dracula was made to be read on days like this: when all through the afternoon the light weens to grey; when the imminent dark of November is only hours away, and even the crook of a spine is a dark and shadowy place. 

 

Beowulf, Fire and Flesh

There is a story about a book that is often talked about among scholars of medieval literature. 

 
The story occurred on the night of 23 October 1731, almost three hundred years ago when a tragedy struck in Ashburnham House in England. It was then that a fire consumed many great pieces of ancient literature. 

As fortune would have it, not among those that burned was what today has come to be the only surviving medieval manuscript of Beowulf. Legend tells that someone had the foresight to throw the priceless manuscript out of the window, thus saving it from the fire. Even so, none can deny that Beowulf was moments away from being destroyed by the flames.

The manuscript, however, was not wholly left undamaged. The edges were badly burned, the corners scorched, and while the words survived, the paper on which they are written is brittle and has only been preserved with extreme care.

The fame of this story among Beowulf scholars cannot be denied. What no one seems to talk about though is the deep irony this chance happening holds. Beowulf, after all, is a tale haunted by fire. Foretold in its outset is a future in which all that the dwellers of the tale seek to protect has been consumed by a mortal fire. Furthermore, the tale's teller, who in Beowulf looks back on a time and age now over,  seeks to keep alive what has been destroyed. 

How incredibly ironic it is that he almost failed because of a fire.

Still, the legendary tale of Beowulf the dragon slayer remain embedded like deep roots into literature, there mostly un-reached by the frosts of time.

How deep those roots go, no one knows. Indeed, no one can tell for certain the source of this epic tale or its origins. The legends of Beowulf the monster slayer have not survived by mistake, no doubt. But though the manuscript which was so nearly lost to us survives, we do not really know where it comes from. Even its original author remains unknown to us. 

Yet the narrator speaks vividly throughout the tale, moving through time as Beowulf grows old and eventually dies, vanquished by the dragons fiery venom. 

Even so, it is clear from the poem's first lines that in the time in which the teller writes he is already looking back to ages gone by. 

"Listen!" he writes

"The fame of Danish kings

in days gone by, the daring feats

worked by those heroes are well known to us."

From the very outset, the teller's words echo with reminiscence, astounded by the glory cast from days now over. 

Of course there is a bit of irony therein that the tale he is about to tell is the only one truly known to us. The heroes of the days gone by and the fame of the Danish kings that lived then remain to us only in fragments. Only that of Beowulf remains intact, though not unscathed. Though there is a bit of prophecy in king Hrothgar's words of praise to him after the monster is slain.

"You (Beowulf) have ensured that men will always sing

your praises, even to the end of the world"

With a little help from a scribe and a monk's foresight (to name a few), this rings true today, for indeed, Beowulf has been remembered.

  Beowulf in Heorot by Alan Lee 

(Note: My sincere apologies to artists Alan Lee and John Howe for burning your art for this project.)

The poem begins by accounting the building of a famous mead-hall. The battles of Hrothgar king of this great hall are accounted only in brief, for they lie outside this legend. It is the hall he builds and what it represents that truly resonates in this tale. 

"He," he are told, "resolved to build a hall,

a large and noble feasting-hall 

of whose splendours men would always speak ... 

In due course

(before very long) this greatest of halls

was completed. Hrothgar, whose very word was counted far and wide as a command, called it Heorot."

Needless to say, the common man no longer speaks of Heorot's splendor, just like the drinking of mead is a custom the meaning of which has been abandoned. 

Next the poem recounts how, here, in this hall of great splendor, the "warrior Danes lived joyful lives."

...until the hellish fiend 

began to perpetrate base crimes"

Thus, Grendel creeps up from some unknown lair, destroying the Danes' joyful lives. It is said that Heorot remained empty for 12 years after that.

"Thus, Grendel ruled, resisted justice, 

one against all, until the best of halls

stood deserted. And so it remained."

 Until Beowulf comes. (Remember that word: Until. It is a crucial word.)

Famously, Beowulf slays three monsters throughout the course of the poem, all of which have been probed and studied endlessly since slain by the famous warrior. In many ways, they are a mystery to us still.

The first to be slain was Grendel. He is described as a "hellish fiend", a "notorious prowler", and is a  "gruesome" man eating creature, said to be condemned by the creator himself. I will not here recount his slaying. It is of little importance when it comes to the force of fire in this tale.

The second to be slain is Grendel's mother, a more puzzling monster still. The poem describes her as a "monster of a woman" a "sea-wolf" with "ghastly claws". Otherwise, she remains mostly featureless, and thus, a mystery. But she swims with sea monsters and gives birth to fiends, that much we know from the story. 

Yet, despite these two monster's fiendish and possibly hellish origins, it is the third one, the dragon, that vanquishes Beowulf. 

Grendel's Mother by John Howe

I wrote a paper on this question once, for it puzzled me greatly that the dragon, a creature of flesh, fire, and bone, is the one to take down Beowulf the man. 

The two die side by side, each taken down by the other. And though, Beowulf proves victorious, it is only moments after the dragon's demise that he too dies, consumed by the serpent's fiery venom.

I no longer think it so strange now that the only truly fleshly creature is the one to slay the warrior. 

After all, the blood of Grendel's mother is enough to melt the iron of a sword. In the heat of battle, Grendel and the woman that birthed him are seen only in flashes, in a flurry of blows and swings. They remain mostly featureless. Truthfully, we will probably never fully know what the author's intent with these was. Indeed, they have been re-imagined and debated over ever since.

Still, the narrator makes it clear that there is something unholy about their nature, for they are not beings of flesh. Beowulf slays these apparently hellish beings as a younger man, and lives to tell the tale. Furthermore, he lives to rule Heorot after Hrothgar is gone. 

Thus, Beowulf rules into old age... Until the dragon comes.

Turin Turamber, The Children of Hurin, by Alan Lee

"It is not until he is himself is old and grey that the dragon appears, rising out of the deep where he has dwelt these last hundred years, sleeping on, unmentioned by the poem and unknown to men. The dragon comes into the story as if summoned by the destiny which binds him to Beowulf." 

So I wrote once in a paper discussing the question of why this fate befits the poem. I do believe somewhere within that paper I missed the point. 

Beowulf is slain by a creature of flesh, like he is himself. Indeed, even in the wake of monsters, in the end it is the battles of the flesh that prove fatal in this legend.

So, while the corpses of the fiends are never inspected after they are slain, the dragon's corpse remains, exposed under the light of day under an open sky.

Beowulf's men find his body there, lifeless in the sand. Beside him lies the creature. The poem tells us that it was

"a loathsome serpent...

the fire-dragon...

was scorched by its own flames."

How fitting this seems to me now, that the blood in the veins of the fiends was hot enough to burn the sword of the warrior who slays them, yet the dragon's own flesh can be burned by the fire he breathes. 

There is something I have not yet told you, reader. As I mentioned in brief, there is a prophecy at the outset of this poem. It appears right after the naming of the great hall of Heorot, the very place Beowulf fights to restore and later rules, the place he dies to protect. It is in this prophecy that there lies the greatest irony in all the poem. 

I mentioned at the start of this post the story of how the Beowulf manuscript was saved from a fire.We have already seen much fire in Beowulf. We have seen it in the fiery blood of Grendel's mother, and the fiery venom of the serpent that claims the warrior's life and scorches its own skin.

But there is a more fleshly and consuming fire in Beowulf, a fire lit by a mortal feud. 

The narrator tells us that the great hall of Heorot, the very hall the poem concerns itself with preserving, will burn to the ground. It will burn in a bitter feud between the Geatish people and the Swedes. It will be destroyed by men because of a rift of loyalty, thus maiming everything the tale of Beowulf celebrates: honor, glory, fame, and fellowship.

The narrator tells us this on page 3. 

Thus, we know before Beowulf even sets foot on the page that what he fights to preserve will not be destroyed by either of the three monsters that threaten it. It will be destroyed by men. 

 

We see the shadow of this prophecy come near in the poem's final pages. The poem ends with war on the kingdoms borders, now exposed without their warrior and king to protect it. Enemies surround its lands even as the smoke of Beowulf's funeral pyre rises to the sky. 

"There on Whaleness, the heroes kindled 

the most mighty of pyres; the dark wood-smoke

soared over the fire, roaring flames 

mingled with weeping ... 

until the body became ash, consumed even 

to its core... 

Heaven swallowed the smoke".

 

It is true that Beowulf survived time, survived fickle frost, and consuming fire. But it did not do so unscathed. Deep roots are not reached by the frost, which passes with the morning and fades with the seasons. But though we do not know when Beowulf was written, we know that by the time the poem was penned, these great ages were already over. 

The manuscript survives today, but it is a brittle remembrance of what Beowulf once symbolized. There are no more meadhalls; today, Lords give no rings for loyalty, and the monsters are all dead. All the dragons have been slain. 

One thing has stayed the same, though. Then, like today, it does not take monsters to topple kingdoms and nations. Men topple those themselves.

And as Tolkien wrote in this essay "The Monsters and the Critics", Beowulf is a poem about our land and our language.  

"(Beowulf) was made in this land,"he writes. "It moves in our northern world beneath our northern sky, and for those who are native to that tongue and land, it must ever call with a profound appeal –until the dragon comes."

 

Remember that word. The inevitably of until can crush the hopeful whisper of unless. As I already mentioned, Beowulf is fire-filled. With a fateful feud lingering on the horizon of its history, it reminds us that even a dragon's flesh can burn in its own fire; and what's more, that even men has hard to kill as Beowulf have been taken down by a dragon.

The Tragedy of Peter Pan

The Star-Crossed Story of How Peter Lost Wendy

I recently wrote about the puzzling feeling of panic my first encounter with Fantastic Mr. Fox left me with. Yet recently I have been thinking about another beloved story from my childhood that leaves me with a far deeper and more personal sort of pain.

The people who are closest to me know that I only watch the film adaptation of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (2003) when I'm incredibly sad. This is because as far back as I can remember, watching the film has left me with a deep feeling of heartache that I could never quite explain.

While the book is in some ways lighter and more whimsical than the film I am referring to, it has a similar sense of sorrow beneath its childish fancy that no child will ever fully pick up on. For one, the fairies and pirates are too distracting, but for another, these gentle sorrows are whispered in a voice only an adult will hear. Children need not trouble themselves with them. Peter Pan has other secrets for them. 

Peter Pan is, after all, a tale that is greatly concerned with children and the act of growing up, and naturally, it contains secrets for both adults and children alike.

Like many books, it begins by stating a universal fact (which it will inevitably try to slip away from).

"All children grow up," the book claims.

Yet contained in this very same line the story simultaneously creates an exception.

"Except one," it whispers. And with that Peter Pan slips away across the page, like across the night sky, revealing himself to be the extraordinary exception to the first universal rule every child eventually comes to know.

Childhood feels like it's forever, while it lasts that is. And at the beginning of Barrie's pondering over this simple idea, he informs us that Wendy was aware of the inevitable-ness of her having to age out of childhood ever since she was two years old. It happened when her mother cried out, quite innocently, "oh, why can't you remain like this forever". And there is that word: forever.

"Two is the beginning of the end," Barrie writes. Another fact.

So, Wendy became aware that forever was only a dream; that forever was available to no one, and nothing.

Not even Peter Pan.

 

Growing up is gradual, and you won't know exactly when you've done it, nor will you know how; much less why. I surely can't tell you how it happens, only that it starts happening when a child first begins to mourn that they will not stay this way forever. (I remember crying over this myself when I was young and wanted everything to be permanent.)

Yet Peter Pan remains the grand exception. For Peter, everything is permanent. And so, from the moment she first meets him in her wakefulness, Wendy, who is by now a great deal more grown up than Peter is, knows that she is "in the presence of a tragedy".

Why? Why this painful word at the beginning of a tale about wonder and childishness?

For Peter Pan, there is another word, equally painful; a word out of which all the great tragedies are made. Love.

The first time the tale mentions it we pay it little heed, for it is a grown up word, unfamiliar to the cares of children.

 

The tale tells the account of how Mr. Darling won their mother's heart by stating a very remarkable and seemingly impossible fact: that once upon a time, when her parents were younger, a great "many gentlemen who had (once) been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her".

Strange, and though perhaps slightly exaggerated, not that strange, after all. For that is how it works. Is it not? One moment you are two and just beginning to wonder if things will ever change, and the next, there is first love; a love that by its first-ness is so unlike the simple love you once knew for your parents. It is not even like the love you have seen your parents display for one another, for there is nothing practical nor sensible about it. This love is a truly unique sort of love, totally untarnished by adulthood. And it is likely that you will never feel anything like it again.

That is part of the enchantment: that you can only love in this way while you are a child, and no child can ever love this way more than once.

It is exactly this type of love that, I believe, Peter Pan feels for Wendy, and she in turn feels for him. It is a love rich in childishness.

We do not know when Peter first sees her. But we do know that she is the first girl he ever brings to Neverland, and I believe that speaks for itself.

As Wendy and her brothers fly away, the narrator asks us if the parents will reach the nursery in time. But time is of little relevance in this story– at least, for now, and if time had played its course then and worked its right, then we would have no story at all.

Yet, when the narrator solemnly promises us that "it will come right in the end" one could also suppose that he not talking about the parent's distress at finding the nursery empty. What he might just as well be saying is that the children will not slip out of time forever. Either way, the answer is the same: the children will return, and time will go right before the story ends.

 

After this, great adventures are had in Neverland, and though it would bring me great thrill to recount them, I think that would be missing the point. I am no longer a child, after all; and adventure, though wonderful, does not apply nor speak to me as it once did. I think of the coming chapters fondly. But nonetheless, they always end so quickly. I cannot hold onto them no matter what I do. The pages pass too quickly. 

But glimpsed between these lines, we see the tragic nature of Peter, and this has never left me.  Wendy knew from the beginning that she was in the presence of a tragedy, and she sees it also there, in the wondrous Neverland. She sees it late at night, when Peter Pan is sleeping and unaware of her.

The narrator tells us that sometimes Peter had dreams that are fully unlike the dreams of other boys, for they were more painful and far more troubling.

"For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them... At such times it has been Wendy's custom to take him out of bed and sit with him on her lap, soothing him in dear ways of her own invention, and when he grew calmer to put him back to bed before he woke up, so that he should not know of the indignity to which she has subjected him."

The narrator never tells us what Peter Pan was dreaming about, only that these dreams had to do with the riddle of Peter's existence. Yet their very painfulness reveals to me now a piece of the tragedy. No feeling, no matter how unchildlike, can alter Peter's nature, can push him into adulthood. Children grow up gradually; they grow up every time they feel something that their childish hearts cannot bare, beginning with the very feeling of the impermanence of the things around them, or of themselves. It lies in the painful contradiction of Peter's nature that a boy who dreams of such un-boyish and troublesome things cannot grow up, can neither out grow them or grow up to understand them better.

Peter Pan has another dream the night they fly back to London to bring Wendy and her brothers home. The story tells us that Wendy held him tight that night, while he was sleeping. But the chapter ends there, and in the one that follows, Wendy Darling returns home. And so, Peter Pan is confronted with the first thing since his whimsical life on Neverland began that has not been permanent.

Peter Pan never admits to loving Wendy, as boys that age never do, expect maybe to their mothers. Peter Pan does. And, because everyone knows that Peter Pan does not have a mother, he tells her's (though she's asleep, and so, she does not hear him.) "I'm fond of her too," he whispers.

 

As the children reunite with their parents, the narrator takes us back outside the window to glance at the sight of the "strange boy", a boy who he tells us as "ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know". And yet, here he was "looking at the one joy from which he must be forever barred."

For Peter Pan, the space between growing up is as narrow and thin as the sheet of glass from Wendy Darling's nursery window.

So why all this? Well, it dawned on me when I listened to Taylor Swifts new song "Cardigan", of all places. Therein lies a line that brought be back to this familiar heart ache story, a line about how Peter loses Wendy.

Strange, that Taylor Swift should sing about Peter Pan in a break up song; and yet, not so strange at all. Because Peter Pan does lose Wendy, in the end. But that is not what makes it all so terrible. What really hurts deep within myself, is the part of me that knows that it takes growing up to get over such a heart break.

The story of Peter Pan, with all its marvelousness and magic, still makes me ache. It made me ache as a child, but only because I could sense, even then, how terribly lonely Peter Pan was there at the end of the film when he looks at Wendy through the window.

As I grew, it reminded me of a different kind of heart ache, the kind that breaks your heart when a childish love doesn't end well and it feels like all the world will never be the same.

I cannot even listen to the musical piece from the film entitled "Fairy Dance" without feeling a twinge of loss deep inside myself, in a box that no one else will ever open. Over time though, I have learned that it is a beautiful kind of heart ache. The kind of hurt your heart feels when you love someone so much that it aches inside, like a tight hug in reverse.

At last, a few weeks ago, I walked down the aisle to this song, so forever reversing what was once a tragedy into the fairy tale definition of a happy ending.

The only feeling of sadness I feel now is that I might never need to watch Peter Pan again; that there will never be a night in which my heart hurts so much that it feels like the world is ending. I have grown out of it, I suppose.

Now, when I hurt, I get to hug my husband. And, what's more, I know from experience that time will pass, and I will grow in wisdom, and I one day I will get over it, no matter how deep the hurt. 

 

Tolkien, Trees, and other Thoughts

I got distracted by the light dancing across my book as I was reading The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien this afternoon.

I love the tree outside my bedroom window, almost as much as I love reading in the afternoon. I love sleeping with the window open so I can listen to the hush of the leaves in the night. I greatly enjoy all the little critters that visit me outside my window, from the birds that come to sing in the morning, to the family of squirrels that sometimes come to gawk at my cat. It is also my favorite place to take a nap, there in the tree filtered afternoon-sun.

Tolkien was himself a great lover of trees. Thus, it is no small wonder that The Lord of the Rings pays such special attention to them. Indeed, the trees are the personality of most every landscape in Middle Earth, be they of the hostile or illustrious variety. They are the constant dwellers, watching over passersby and temporary inhabitants that come and go throughout the years, such a short while in the long life of a tree.

Tolkien himself had a tree outside his window once which he claimed helped inspire his story Leaf by Niggle, an odd and wonderful tale that feels altogether dreamlike. He wrote about this tree in the books original introductory note, saying

"One of (the tale's) sources was a great-limbed popular tree that I could see even lying in bed. It was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner. I do not know why. It is cut down now, a less barbarous punishment for any crimes it may have been accused of, such as being large or alive. I do not think that it had any friends, or any mourners, except myself and a pair of owls."

Altogether, leafing through these letters written by a mentor that I will never get to meet has been wonderful, even more so than I expected.

Reading through his rambles –regarding such themes as the struggles of procrastination in the face of productivity, his constant anguish at the regrettable busyness of his schedule, and the woe brought on by a book that doesn't want to get done, have all made me realize that maybe I know what I'm doing after all. Self-doubt is no stranger to even the greats.

I sometimes feel small in comparison, so un-heightened by time, so stuck in the scope of the present with a book that is only as old as the files containing it on my computer; a book that is still so unlived in. But knowing that someone I so admire has struggled with the same things as I am toiling with now brings me an unexpected sort of comfort. All this is mostly normal, after all; as normal as the life of anyone who takes up writing can ever be.

Tolkien barely dared dream that so many would share in his delight for his Middle Earth.

Books are wrought only with great pain and frustration, for the imagination rarely complies well with the limits of our vocabulary and the hampered frame of the page.

But once the wrestling is through, and the writer sits back and cries in wonder and fear at what they have created, the book becomes severed from them. As Tolkien wrote:

"(The) goal was reached at last. It is finished... (but) now I look at it, the magnitude of my disaster is apparent to me. My work has escaped my control, and I have produced a monster."

Sometimes the book fades away after that, collecting dust on a back shelf, thought about from time to time only by they that sired it, sometimes with fondness, sometimes with regret. But every so often, if chance allows, a book will fly away to other horizons, where it finds other shelves, from that of a publisher, to possibly that of a reader.

Who can ever know for certain how many shelves a book can make a home in, nestled in comfortably, as if it's already forgotten they that toiled for it before it could stand up on its own. But, the writer won't know: not where it goes, nor how shelves it comes home to; much less how many readers might find a semblance of home in reading it.

Indeed, no one can ever truly guess what might happen when you release a wild book onto the vast world.

For now though, it is much nicer to simply read under the shadow of a tree, and dream of the day when my own book will forget about me and find a home on the shelf of another.