Dear Pogue,

Having mused on Monday, as is my habit, I came a cross this quote in a feed I take weekly. I felt that it flowed like and from my Monday Musing. It speaks of an alternative world, maybe a better world, a world that is all but lost today. Maybe this is, in part, the world I remember from my childhood, the world I am beginning to miss. Oh, let there be magic in the world once again!

This life I have made is too small. It doesn’t allow enough in: enough ideas, enough beliefs, enough encounters with the exuberant magic of existence. I have been so keen to deny it, to veer deliberately towards the rational, to cling solely to the experiences that are directly observable by others. Only now, when everything is taken away, can I see what a folly this is. I don’t want that life anymore. I want what [the] ancients had: to be able to talk to god. Not in a personal sense, to a distant figure who is unfathomably wise, but to have a direct encounter with the flow of things, a communication without words. I want to let something break in me, some dam that has been shoring up this shamefully atavistic sense of the magic behind all things, the tingle of intelligence that was always waiting for me when I came to tap in. I want to feel that raw, elemental awe that my ancestors felt, rather than my tame, explained modern version. I want to prise open the confines of my skull and let in a flood of light and air and mystery… I want to retain what the quiet reveals, the small voices whose whispers can be heard only when everything falls silent.

Katherine May, Enchantment: wakening Wonder in an Anxious Age(public library) as quoted in The Marginalian (12/03/2023).

I’ve written to you before about the young girl who, having read C.S.Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was found curled in the back of her own wardrobe and on being asked why she was there replied she was waiting for the magic to begin. Maybe that girl was a young Katherine May. Whoever, I will gladly join her because this world desperately needs a sense of magic once again.

Maybe that’s what I was unknowingly trying to communicate when I wrote on Monday? This generation, and those to come, are growing in a world filled with technology but with no magic and so becoming smaller people due to the sacrifice. And they don’t know it!

Makes me sad, Pogue. Every child should grow with a sense of the magic that pervades life. I guess I’ll go and sit in the wardrobe a while!

Yours, waiting for it to begin,

Wic.