{"id":11263,"date":"2025-07-29T17:35:56","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T21:35:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/cristina-campo-on-fairy-tales-time-and-the-meaning-of-maturity-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T17:35:56","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T21:35:56","slug":"cristina-campo-on-fairy-tales-time-and-the-meaning-of-maturity-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/cristina-campo-on-fairy-tales-time-and-the-meaning-of-maturity-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Cristina Campo on Fairy Tales, Time, and the Meaning of Maturity \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\u201cIf you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,\u201d Einstein reportedly told one mother<\/a> who wished for her son to become a scientist. \u201cIf you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.\u201d Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plasticity of being<\/a> that allows us to navigate uncertainty, given that uncertainty is the pulse-beat of our lives, fairy tales are not \u2014 as J.R.R. Tolkien so passionately insisted<\/a> \u2014 only for children. They are more than fantasy, more than fiction, shimmering with a surreality so saturated that it becomes a mirror for what is realest in us, what we are often yet to see. They enchant us with their strangeness because we are largely strangers to ourselves, ambivalent in our yearning for transformation<\/a>, for redemption, for homecoming, restless in our longing to unmask the face of love and unglove the hand of mercy. They ask us to believe in magic and reward our trust with truth. <\/p>\n

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Art by Maurice Sendak for a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fairy tales are above all in service of life\u2019s most difficult, most unfinishable task \u2014 knowing who we are and what we want. Their most revelatory function is to remind us that, because we know ourselves only incompletely, we don\u2019t always know what we are looking for until we find it, often by way of getting lost, or until it finds us, often in a guise we don\u2019t immediately recognize as the very thing we long for. <\/p>\n

That is what Italian writer Cristina Campo<\/strong> (April 29, 1923\u2013January 10, 1977) explores in her excellent posthumous essay collection The Unforgivable: And Other Writings<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

Observing that many fairy tales \u201cend like a ring right where they began,\u201d she writes:<\/p>\n

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In a fairy tale, there are no roads. You start out walking, as if in a straight line, and eventually that line reveals itself to be a labyrinth, a perfect circle, a spiral, or even a star \u2014 or a motionless point the soul never leaves, even as body and mind take what appears to be an arduous journey. You seldom know where you are traveling, or even what you are traveling toward, for you cannot know, in reality, what the water ballerina, or the singing apple, or the fortune-telling bird may be. Or the word to conjure with: the abstract, culminating word that is stronger than any certainty.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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One of Kay Nielsen\u2019s stunning 1914 illustrations for Scandinavian fairy tales<\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Through these routeless convolutions, we map the terra incognita of your own interior world. In a passage evocative of the Chinese notion of wu-wei<\/em><\/a> \u2014 \u201ctrying not to try\u201d \u2014 Campo considers the paradox of self-discovery:<\/p>\n

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Since the thing you start out looking for cannot and must not have a face, how can you recognize the means to reach it until you\u2019ve reached it? How can the destination ever be anything but an apparent destination?<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

No one arrives at the enlightenment he<\/a> sets out to seek. It will come to him in its own sweet time. Thus the destination walks side by side with the traveler\u2026 Or it hovers behind him\u2026 In truth, the traveler has always had it within him and is only moving toward the motionless center of his life: the antrum near the spring, the cave \u2014 where childhood and death, in one another\u2019s arms, confide the secret they share. The idea of travel, effort, and patience is paradoxical, yes, but it is also exact. For in this paradox, we stumble on the intersection of eternity and time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is hardly surprising that, in their central project of loosening the clutch of certainties we call a self, fairy tales blur the ordinary experience of time \u2014 time, after all, is the substance we are made of<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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Another of One of Kay Nielsen\u2019s Scandinavian fairy tales illustrations<\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In a passage brimming with the musicality Maurice Sendak considered the key to great storytelling<\/a>, Campo \u2014 the daughter of a musician and a composer \u2014 writes:<\/p>\n

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The geometry of time and space is abolished as if by magic. You walk for hours in a circle, or conversely, you reach the edge of the infinite in a few quick steps. It isn\u2019t our state of heightened vigilance that casts a spell on the world around us; it is a much more recondite correspondence between discovering and letting ourselves be discovered \u2014 between giving shape and taking shape. Everything already was, but today it truly is. Today any peasant, pointing in any direction, will sound like a gnome or a fairy, will gesture at the path you nearly took a thousand times without suspecting it. The path that leads to four indescribably white springs suspended on the hillside, protected, for a hundred paces or a thousand miles, by fields of tall fragrant grasses; or to the royal tomb hidden by the Etruscans in a cave now covered with brambles, out of which white hounds and a man the size of an ifrit, carrying a shotgun, emerge; or down below the ridge secretly lighted by the sun, at a bend in the riverbank so deep it casts the whole hanging tangle of pink roots into shadow. Velvet water that looks motionless and yet moves. Water that runs off into the beyond without flowing, so that it would be enough just to follow it, for that beyond which is always forbidden, always intimated in our dreams, is transpiring here and now.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I am thinking now of Hannah Arendt\u2019s magnificent meditation on love<\/a>: \u201cFearlessness is what love seeks,\u201d<\/em> she wrote. \u201cSuch fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future\u2026 Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.\u201d<\/em> Perhaps this is why love is the central axis of most fairy tales, why love in real life has a certain dreamlike quality, why both love and dreams are ways of getting to know the stranger in us. \u201cIn each of us there is another whom we do not know,\u201d Carl Jung wrote, \u201c[who] speaks to us in dreams.\u201d <\/p>\n

<\/a>
One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett\u2019s 1929 illustrations for French fairy tales<\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a> and stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There is the same dreamlike quality and the same capacity for revelation in the state we enter once a fairy tale ejects us from time and thrusts into nowness. Campo paints the dreamscape we enter:<\/p>\n

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Quick glances direct our steps, hands point beyond the thresholds. Behind windowpanes so clear they blind us move the figures of the ones we loved, the ones we\u2019ve lost, who, behold, stand up from the piano bench or arrange fruit on a table. It all unfolds like a scroll from a mouth known yet unknown, a dark and luminous sentence, an irrefutable commentary set down between past and future.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In being both a portal between the known and the unknown and a still point between past and future, fairy tales help us discern our own nature by guiding us toward the deepest truths of who we are and helping us apply them to the mystery of being alive \u2014 a nonlinear process the fruits of which we call maturity<\/a>. Campo writes:<\/p>\n

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Maturity is not the result of persuasion, much less an intellectual epiphany. It is a sudden, I would almost like to say biological, collapse. It is a point that must be reached by all the senses at once if truth is going to be turned into nature.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Complement with Polish Nobel laureate Wis\u0142awa Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear<\/a> and Ana\u00efs Nin on the meaning of maturity<\/a>, then revisit the greatest illustrations from 200 years of Brothers Grimm fairy tales<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
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\u201cIf you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,\u201d Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11264,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}