Walking on Water by Madeleine L'Engle Page A

may, to the child artist, be an elephant inside a boa constrictor.
    So what happens? Why do we lose our wonderful, rackety creativity? What corrupts us?
    Corrupt:
another unpopular word; another important one. Its importance first struck me when I was reading Thomas Traherne, one of my favourite seventeenth-century poets and mystics. “Certainly Adam and Eve in Paradise had not more sweete and curious apprehensions of the world than I when I was a child,” he wrote. Everything was new and delightful for him. The rosy glow of sunrise had in it the flaming glory of creation. The stars at night were a living, heavenly dance. He listened to the grass growing, smelled the west wind, tasted the rain, touched the grains of sand on the shore. All his senses, his mind, his heart, were alive and in touch with
be
ing. “So that,” Traherne adds sadly, “without much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty devices of this world, which now I
unlearn,
and become as it were a little child again, that I may enter into the kingdom of God.”
    A lot of my adult life has been spent in trying to overcome this corruption, in unlearning the dirty devices of this world, which would dull our imaginations, cut away our creativity. So it is only with the conscious-unself-consciousness of a child that I can think about theories of aesthetics, of art, particularly as these touch upon my questions about life and love and God.
    —
    I was still at the age of unself-conscious spontaneity when I started to write. At the age of five I wrote a story, which my mother saved for a long time, about a little “grul,” my five-year-old spelling for
girl.
    I wrote stories because I was a solitary, only child in New York City, with no easily available library where I could get books. So when I had read all the stories in my bookcase, the only way for me to get more stories to read was to write them.
    And I knew, as a child, that it was through story that I was able to make some small sense of the confusions and complications of life. The sound of coughing from my father’s gas-burned lungs was a constant reminder of war and its terror. At school I read a book about the Belgian babies impaled on bayonets like small, slaughtered animals. I saw pictures of villages ravaged by the
Bôches.
The thought that there could ever be another war was a source of deep fear. I would implore my parents, “There won’t be another war, will there?” My parents never lied to me. They tried to prepare me for this century of war, not to frighten me.
    But I was frightened, and I tried to heal my fear with stories, stories which gave me courage, stories which affirmed that ultimately love is stronger than hate. If love is stronger than hate, then war is not all there is. I wrote, and I illustrated my stories. At bedtime my mother told me more stories. And so story helped me to learn to live. Story was in no way an evasion of life, but a way of living life creatively instead of fearfully.
    It was a shock when one day in school one of the teachers accused me of “telling a story.” She was not complimenting me on my fertile imagination. She was making the deadly accusation that I was telling a lie.
    If I learned anything from that teacher, it was that lie and story are incompatible. If it holds no truth, then it cannot truly be story. And so I knew that it was in story that I found flashes of that truth which makes us free.
    —
    And yet we are still being taught that fairy tales and myths are to be discarded as soon as we are old enough to understand “reality.” I received a disturbed and angry letter from a young mother who told me that a friend of hers, with young children, gave them only instructive books; she wasn’t going to allow their minds to be polluted with fairy tales. They were going to be taught the “real” world.
    This attitude is a victory for the powers of this world. A friend of mine, a fine storyteller, remarked to me, “Jesus was not a