Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Children ask the big questions, and these dreamy books venture to answer.
Sep 28, 1999 | Children are natural philosophers, perhaps because they have so much to resolve if they're to have any hope of getting along in the world. Such as: Why do things fall when I drop them? Do they always? How can my mother tell when I'm lying? Is she? Will it be morning again tomorrow? How do I know whether I'm awake or dreaming? And a mind that's building a philosophy to live by doesn't stop at the practical questions. Where does the moon go in the day? Did the world really exist before I was born? When will I get to be older than my big sister? How do I know I'm really me?
When I was 7, I used to lie awake at night wondering about infinity. I would imagine myself swimming up from my bed into the darkness of space, on and on, out and out. It had to stop somewhere, I thought, so I imagined a brick wall marking the end. But what was beyond the brick wall? Sometimes I broke through into more darkness, miles of it, hours of it, until the emptiness made me panic and I added another wall -- only to break through it into more space. Sometimes, to stave off the darkness, I would imagine the wall extending in its red-brown solidity, filling the space beyond it with bricks and mortar, until that, too, became oppressive. Eventually, unnerved, I'd crawl into bed with my parents.
The narrator of Michéle Lemieux's fascinating "Stormy Night" has an uncannily similar experience. "I can't sleep," she tells us. "Too many questions are buzzing through my head. Where does infinity end? If someone made a hole in the sky, would we see infinity? And if we made a hole in that hole, what would we see?"
Like a cosmonaut moving from hole to hole, the book takes its readers through one simple but profound query after another, each illustrated with a pen-and-ink drawing -- over 200 pages of them. It's an unusual yet satisfying format, inviting young philosophers to dwell, or, if they prefer, to dip in and duck out. There are several months' worth of bedtime koans here.
In her drawings -- gentle cartoons with a surrealist flavor -- Lemieux extends the text, rather than giving literal illustrations. For example, the comment "Sometimes I feel as if my eyes can see inside me" faces a sketch of a boy sketching; the top of his head is transparent, and inside we see a man holding aloft a lantern. At his feet, a staircase leads down, possibly into the boy's nose. "I'm scared of being separated from everyone I love" shows a cake decorated with a village -- houses, poplars, a church. A slice is being carried away on a cake server, topped with a tiny figure that stretches its arms toward the village. And Lemieux illustrates the question "What about me -- do I have an imagination?" with a picture of her heroine looking through a spyglass pressed to a mirror. Can she see her own eye in the darkness?
The narrator of "Stormy Night" worries a lot about the future and her place in it. "Will my name be in the encyclopedia?" she wonders. "If we could switch bodies, would someone choose mine?" "Will I always make the right decisions? And how will I know if they're right?" But while these questions may seem personal, the narrator is a kid with a speculative mind; they always open out into broader inquiries. Her journey is a little scary perhaps, but she has a dog, Fido, to keep her company through her philosophical night. At the book's end, after peeking through that hole in the sky at possible afterworlds, she falls asleep at last. Readers who have followed her twisting path to sleep can amuse themselves imagining what she finds there.
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