Once Upon A Time

I just bought a book, "The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales" with the book vouchers government so generously gave to Malaysian students. Funny, they decided to give them now. Hmm. Well, I digress. Let's talk about the book.

According to the author, the search for the meaning of life begins as early as childhood. However, it's just the method and ways of understanding that are different. While adults actively search for the meaning of life by relating to the purposes and goals, children view the meaning of life as the way to differentiate between good and evil.

Fairy tales offer these children just that. While being simplistic (that people are either good or bad, and that people are either beautiful or ugly, etc.), they successfully tell children what this life has to offer. According to the author, this is why fairy tales often deal with the unspeakable miseries, such as the death of a parent, poverty, losing one's love, because, well, it is life after all. Though they rarely could verbalize their view of life effectively, they still cope with various life's problems - just like adults.

Try to compare the traditional fairy tales with the modern children literature. The author argues that modern children literature are aimed at entertaining or informing, or both, and they are also very shallow. Children, in social sciences, are considered as minorities and in scientific inquiry, there are certain ways to communicate and study minorities. One thing that modern science fails to understand that is that children have the cognitive capacity to understand the world, although not as expressively as adults, but they have their own language - and fairy tales, are their language.

As a result of that assumption, people tend to have "gentle" and "easy" ways of communicating with children, and this is reflected in the designation of modern literature. Modern children literature always deal with problems that are "childish" and that seem to be easy to face - fighting with a friend, or the consequence of stealing a cheap snack, or failing in school. But fairy tales tell stories of life and death, loneliness, and those life challenges that we presume only adults could comprehend.

For those who are in search of an interesting, academic, yet understandable, yet leisure-ish book, "The Uses of Enchantment" is one good choice for you.