This is a fun essay from Katherine Rundell. I’ll forgive her for using Plato to argue for censoring social media at the end when she would (in fact she has!) argued against him in exactly the opposite direction on the censorship of poetry or children’s books.
Recommended.
In 1803, Samuel Taylor Coleridge sat in his astronomer’s study in Keswick, and wrote in his notebook his central Principle of Criticism:
never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former – we know it a priori – but every work has not the latter, and he, therefore, who discovers them, tells you something that you could not with certainty, or even with probability, have anticipated.
It is the work of a writer for children to do the same for the world itself. Children have not yet built wide hinterlands: to them, the world is still opaque and full of necessary bewilderment. Those who write for children have the chance to point them towards beauty that they do not yet know exists: towards versions of joy that they have not yet imagined possible.
In being written for those to whom the world is new and strange, for those who are without economic power, and for those who need short, sharp, bold stories, children’s literature can be a form of distillation: of what it means to hope, to fear, to yearn, distilled down and down into a piece of concentrated meaning. But you cannot claim to be a magician and fail to produce the rabbit.
…
It was W.H. Auden who said: ‘there are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.’ The great discipline of children’s fiction is that it has to be written for everyone: because if it is not for everyone then it’s not for anyone at all. It offers us the specific joy of finding our commonality: we can all meet on the pages of A.A. Milne in a way that we cannot on the pages of Jacques Derrida.
Katherine Rundell – Why Children’s Books? [LRB]
See also:
Katherine Rundell
Katherine Rundell on the subversive politics of children’s books
Katherine Rundell on learning from children’s books
Katherine Rundell on children’s books and imagination
Katherine Rundell on the aesthetics of language: form and substance
Books and Reading
“Led by pleasure and wonder”: Dana Gioia on creating a new generation of readers
Neil Gaiman on reading fiction, empathy, and changing the world
Reading: Oliver Burkeman on information overload, big rocks and the British Library
Deep Literacy: what it takes
Tyler Cowen on reading fast, reading well, and reading widely
Love and Clusters: (more from) Tyler Cowen and Russ Roberts on Reading and How to Read
Trilogy: Books as Network
Misreading the mind: Ezra Klein and Nicholas Carr on transactional reading and contemplation
“I read a line and I like it enough to read the next”: George Saunders on Stories as Linear Temporal Phenomena
Schopenhauer on reading yourself stupid
What’s reading worth? OECD data on the economic returns to literacy
Slava Akhmechet on reading in clusters
Children in Understanding: David Hume on Reading (history)
McKinley Valentine (and Italo Calvino) on how reading changes the past
McKinley Valentine on the user experience of the whodunnit (and neural networks)
Steve Levitt on the user experience of reading David Epstein and Malcolm Gladwell
Deep Literacy: Kevin Kelly on more than reading
Paul Romer on literacy, dyslexia, inequality and the joy of reading
C.S. Lewis on reading the originals
Clifford Ashley on folk art and reading as rivals
Seth Godin on physical books
Niall Ferguson on culture, text-for-profit, libraries, search and literacy
PISA: defining literacy
PISA on the changing nature of literacy
Canon: fences and trampolines
Writing and Reading as Technology Series
Writing and Reading as Technology (1): Transforming Fire; Slow Burn
Writing and Reading as Technology (2): Half-baked Beginnings
Writing and Reading as Technology (3): Marginal Revolutions
Writing and Reading as Technology (4): Innovation at Play; or, A Loaded Pun
Writing and Reading as Technology (5): Literacy as Infrastructure for Thought
Writing and Reading as Technology (6): Stop Press. Who invented moveable type?
Writing and Reading as Technology (7): History’s First Mass Literacy Campaign?
Writing and Reading as Technology (8): Augmenting Reality
Writing and Reading (and visual art) as Technology (9): Virtual Realities
Writing and Reading as Technology (10): Elizabeth Eisenstein on the Printing Press and the End of the Information Famine
Writing and Reading as Technology (11): Writing Rules
Writing and Reading as Technology (12): Elizabeth Eisenstein on How the Printing Press Changed Books
Writing and Reading as Technology (13): Erik Engheim on Gutenberg vs earlier Asian printing technologies
Writing and Reading as Technology (14): Magical Paper Sizes; or, The Golden Non-Ratio
Writing and Reading as Technology (15): videos on the evolution of the alphabet and the spread of writing