​Golden Apples and Chocolate Buttons

“Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green,” writes G.K. Chesterton. “They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.” It follows, he argues, that stories return us to the state of mind of a bright-eyed child, where everything is full of wonder.

Since I first read this argument, I have turned it over in my mind many times. I am far from an expert on myth—I once confused Joseph Campbell with Joseph McCarthy on public television. But, I imagine, when it comes to myth and fairytale, the most ordinary of ordinary people has as much a right to speak as an expert. So as a child of (mostly) the West, all I know is that in fairy tales, things come in groups of three.

One of my first memories is of tropical fish. I am age three or four, wearing an orange dress and sitting on a dock with crisscrossed bars, looking at my feet and the reef below. The wind ripples across the ocean and I think, rather morbidly, about growing old.

The second is of white chocolate buttons. My parents have frozen a large packet of them for our dessert and every day after dinner, I get to eat two. Every hot, humid day I look forward to them—they’re almost like ice cream. I can still taste them now: smooth as sugary plastic, chalky and delicious.

The last is of going on an unexpected journey. I meander into the forest and meet all sorts of strange and wonderful creatures. As clever as I’ve ever been, I trick my way into keeping a magic ring, and I encounter my first dragon, via Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”.

To four-year-old me, white chocolate buttons—or even learning to count—were as wonderful as were tropical reefs or elves. To people in winter-cold Massachusetts, a tropical island seems magnificent, but if you live on said island, it’s the same as living in a humid city anywhere else. In adulthood, chocolate buttons taste only of chalk, and it’s easy to let our world become small. It’s easy to think that to keep life interesting we have to be constantly going to new places and meeting new people. But one only needs to read "The Hobbit" as an adult to know this is untrue.

In stories, a mundane morsel of food can keep a person strong for days, and we marvel at its ability. In stories, dragons can be brilliantly good or hellishly evil, but household dust can be as curious as either of them. In story, recipes can bring to mind at once both the romantic and the terrible, and shoes might only fit one woman out of the masses. A humble fisherman might conquer the supernatural… and so on. Stories, time and time again, are an escape from the doldrums of despond.

Wonder seeps forth from the cracks in reality: from fairy tales, fantasy, magical realism; from beautifully written stories and beautifully crafted plots; from the masterpieces that combine the two; from those stories spoken before they were written; from books with political undertones, and from books with undertones of love.

Wonder oozes from films. Not just blockbuster films, not just arthouse films, but films that do myth well—films that make you yearn for centuries past or future. Wonder comes from films that sharpen, not dull, you to suffering: films where the beautiful is otherworldly, and the sorrowful makes you cry for the world.

Wonder sprouts, also, from the creation of art. From writing the absurd apparitions of 2:30 a.m.; the thoughts from a train ride through the countryside. It comes from writing about childhood and the childhood impossibilities, from immersion and engagement with stories and myths from different times and places. Wonder comes from writing about our world as if it were a dreamlike fantasy to be explored—because it is.

So read, engage, write. And if you have no books, then listen. If you have no paper, then tell stories in your head. If you can do neither, then remember: Both the world as it was, and the world as it might have been if it were new.

Siobhan McDonough ’17, a social studies concentrator, lives in Kirkland House. Her Summer column appears on alternate Mondays.