The loss of the magical sense of the world
This is a powerful extract from a piece in the Guardian by Lucy Mangan, whose writing I like. It resonated with me, so I wanted to record it in my blog. Here it is.
"The evils once confined to fairytales and folklore have burst their fictive boundaries and bled into the real world
Stories to make sense of the world… They used to, I know, but now the world is outpacing the narratives we have contrived over the generations to render it comprehensible. More and more I find myself reading headlines and articles that suggest that the evils once confined to fairytales and folklore have burst their fictive boundaries and bled into the real world. Tales abound of kingdoms ruined by war; of missing and murdered children; of young women imprisoned for years, not by magic but by fathers; of predators roaming free, not courtesy of witchcraft, but of conspiracies of silence and a simple imbalance of power without a wand or enchanted axe to right it. The extremes that stories are meant to invoke and warn and protect us against dwell among us, and I feel in some way horribly betrayed. The big bad wolf is here, not there. Little Red Riding Hood is not a metaphor. Even our imaginations couldn't fathom such horrors, once upon a time..."
