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How to devastate your children   Last night I read a story to my seven-year old daughter in which a horse was decapitated, then its severed head was nailed to a village archway, where it continued to speak, but only in confusing riddles. At the end of the story, one of the characters was shut inside a barrel filled with nails, then pulled through the muddy streets until dead.  Ah, the magic of fairy tales! We have always loved fables in our house, but now, as our daughter has to deal with the incessant nonsense of the outside world, I’ve noticed Hadley mining more and more meaning from these ancient stories, told and retold again for generations, in huts and subdivisions, riding in donkey carts and in Toyotas.  We read ones from all over the world, but they tend to follow the same common themes regardless of setting. In the first or second line of each story, I inevitably come to a line that states, “The little girl/boy lived all alone in the woods because their parents….” At which point I nod to my daughter, who says, with confidence and wide eyes, “…were dead!” “That’s right,” I say. “The parents were dead.” People often question why this is, but the answer is obvious: Because the vast majority of children will outlive their parents, their caretakers, their teachers and their heroes. Live long enough, and you might even outlive your country, your economy, your gods and even your very ideology.  The world is filled with people who are going on without the ones who loved them most, and without the ones who got them to the starting point of their respective journeys.  Death is the beginning to almost every one of these stories, which transcend time and place and class. The end of life for one person marks the beginning of life for another. It is in loss that our heroes always embark on their greatest journeys. And when we head out the door on these adventures, we always know that we are lost, too, because even if we come home again someday, our old self will be gone forever, replaced by a great adventurer. Whether it is an old fairy story from the Black Forest, or a new movie about Batman, the fact is that we all know how things end up for the main character’s mom and dad.  Right now, we are making our way through the complete collection of the Grimm Brothers’ Collected Fairy Tales. They are each comically dark, filled with violence and strange lessons about the strange world. Before that, it was Old Peter’s Russian Fairy Tales, which are even weirder, and absolutely brim with frozen corpses and mystical idiots (I mean this in the Dostoyevsky-an sense) and fools. Many feature Baba Yaga, who has iron teeth and lives in a hut perched on giant chicken legs.  Before that it was a series of Taoist stories, most of which reminded us that we are insignificant, fated to die and rot, and that basically all the things we value are inherently without meaning or value. But within Taoism there is a thread of hope, which is that if we see things for what they are, and accept this, we can walk the Way, the “path,” and be in harmony with the world while we are here. I was excited when I learned that Leo Tolstoy, the great, beardy author of Anna Karenina, War and Peace and The Death of Ivan Ilyich, wrote a collection of children’s stories more than 100 years ago, and that it was published in English. I found a marvelous review of it in the Los Angeles Review of Books, written by John Byron Kuhner.  The review’s headline was: “Leo Tolstoy’s Children’s Stories Will Devastate Your Children and Make You Want To Die.” Now, those sound like some good fairy tales! At first, Byron Kuhner was wary, but, as he puts it: “[P]estilence has closed the schools and home reading was important. Tolstoy wrote them; they couldn’t be that bad. Now I sincerely wish I had never touched them.” The book is called The Lion and the Puppy: And Other Stories for Children. In the title story, zookeepers throw an adorable puppy into a lion’s cage at the zoo, so that the big cat will have something to eat. The lion instead becomes friends with the puppy, who then gets sick and dies. The lion is very sad, and then he dies, too.  The end.  It basically follows the traditional Russian narrative arc.  My daughter and I take great joy in dark, tragic tales, because the world is dark and tragic, and those with clear enough vision to see how funny it all is wear a special kind of armor as they come up against their dragons, trolls and other villains each day. Modern humans choose to see everything in the most binary ways: people are either Republicans or Democrats, bad or good, beautiful or ugly. But in truth, most things are many things, and the people who realize this are the ones you see laughing in the midst of lives full of grim tragedies, sauntering down the harmonious path. I want my daughter to laugh when, at the beginning of every good story, the parents die, because it is my sincerest wish that when I die (hopefully not too soon) it will only be the very beginning of her greatest adventure. When all is lost, that is when we tend to set out to face the biggest of dragons. And the biggest dragons make for the best stories.  It bears repeating what G.K. Chesterton pointed out: that fairy tales are important not because they teach us that dragons exist, but because they teach us that dragons can be defeated. Likewise, they are important not because they teach us that death and loss and unfairness are real, but rather because they teach us that they are merely the beginning of things beautiful and epic and good.  The Grimm Brothers said the tales they collected were “monstrous, irrational and unnatural.” They are also completely universal and generous, giving meaning to ancient people and to a seven-year-old child in Wisconsin in the year 2021.  Joseph Campbell points out that “priests, wizards, and visionaries interpret and re-interpret myth as symbolic of ‘the Way.’”  “And this Way, congenial to the wholeness of humans, is understood as the little portion of the Great Way that binds the cosmos,” he continues. Fairy tales and myths, says Hugo Winkler, are “an everlasting reiteration of unchanging principles.” “The Way of the individual is the microcosmic reiteration of the Way of the All and of each,” explains Campbell.  Campbell says that according to Jacques Maritain, “The Indian, Celtic, Arabian, and Medieval masters of narrative to whom we owe the most exquisite of our European tales were the practitioners of a craft that strove to reveal through mortal things the brilliance of eternal forms.”  Perhaps that is why we delight in these dark tales. Maybe that is why we laugh, as all these frogs and princes and witches suffer, live and die. Because they show us the Way, and remind us that we are part of it, however small we may be and feel.  Campbell says these fairy tales are entertainment, that they have always been cherished “for their fascination.” “Hence, when the acids of the modern spirit dissolved the kingdoms of the gods, the tales in their essence were hardly touched.”  My daughter despises going to school. She feels no real closeness to any of the teachers or students. She cries as she recounts to me all the bullying and cruelty she sees in those around her, returning home daily with some sad new story of how awful her day was in second grade. I never know quite what to say to her. I always detested school, and I don’t recall learning anything important there. I don’t want to lie to her and tell her any of this is actually important. But in truth, she has to go, perhaps because that is where the monsters are, and every good story has its monsters.  All that I have learned in my 42 years, I learned from stories. So I cannot lie to my daughter and tell her there is any real point to this unpleasant place she is forced to go each day. All I can say is, “I’m sorry,” give her a hug, and open an old book, full of tales of people who have it far worse. They have their eyeballs plucked out. They are turned into wild beasts. They are wounded and beheaded and tricked. Children are cooked in ovens. All of their parents…. are dead!  Somehow, as monstrous and irrational as these stories are, they always work. They remind us that hardship – even unfair, pointless hardship – is part of any good adventure. Without a bunch of Orcs, the Lord of the Rings is just a bunch of short people going on a walk to return some jewelry.  These stories reassure us that all that we are and all that we feel, are small parts of something very large. They show us that we can go on until we cannot, and then someone else goes on without us, telling the same stories. The same story. Because all stories are the same story, really, told again and again, over and over. “Its world of magic is symptomatic of fevers deeply burning in the psyche,” says Campbell. “Permanent presences, desires, fears, ideals, potentialities, that have glowed in the nerves, hummed in the blood, baffled the senses, since the beginning.”