Book Study: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Introduction

This is a book that Kiernan asked for for Christmas. I snuck upstairs and read the introduction after it arrived. It was so luscious and yummy, I didn't want to stop and wrap it. But I dug deep within myself and did the right thing. :-)

I'm still fighting the anemia in my body (by resting more, not actually fighting :-). So, I was thinking I needed to get back to some book studies (ones I've started and not finished, and others I have in mind.) I took it as a sure sign that I need to finish Ten Ways when Cindy over at Ordo Amoris announced that she was starting a book study on it.

As I said before, the introduction was wonderful and put to words many of the things I already believe. It's fun to read something that you already believe in. :-) It's encouraging and hopeful, and makes you feel less alone.

Esolen's intro is brilliant. He begins by telling us about a vandal at his college library removing thousands and thousands of books from the shelves to destroy, and we find out that the vandal was actually the librarian. (I see this often in my own hometown library.) But we soon see that he is making an analogy between books and children.

Reading the first paragraph as if it's referring to children (and abortion), and not books, we see that we simply want to get rid of them, even though they are irreplaceable. (And in the second paragraph I think I see a nod toward the elderly also - they grow old, and begin to be ragged around the edges.)

[A not-fun, but wonderful movie on what our world would be like if there were no children is "The Children of Men." It's like the scene in "It's a Wonderful Life", in which Clarence says, "Okay, you get your wish. You've never been born." It's like P.D. James decides to explore the idea of what would happen if all of a sudden we got our wish and we stopped having children. It's not pretty! It becomes quite clear that it is children that keep the world gentle and beautiful.]

Fleshing out the analogy between books and children, Esolen says they are bulky, take up space, are inconvenient, only interest a few people, are mischievous, and can ruin your calm and efficient day.

He also confronts our hypocrisy when we say, "we love books (children)," but we don't really want any around, or, at the most, only a few. If we loved them, we would have some, and we would truly consider them treasures. We would love the wonder we would find in them.

But children are also dangerous, mischievous, and take you into other worlds, a world where anything can happen.

And that's the scary part. They are unpredictable. Especially when their imaginations are involved (and valued and fed.)

We don't like this. No, siree, we don't like this one little bit, Sam I am.

But once we do decide to have some, Esolen boldly tells us that we lie to ourselves if we say we don't want our children to settle down and stop upsetting the status quo. (We want it so much that we routinely medicate children to get them to "settle down.")

Esolen really pulls out all the stops in the next to last paragraph of the intro. He hits on immodest clothing, refined sugar, shopping malls, processed (fake) foods, mass media, and our political culture.

I was really struck by Esolen's little phrase in this paragraph --"they owe it to us."

How much of what we do with children is about us? About our personal economic prosperity? They owe it to us to be cogs in the great wheel of fortune of our world, do they not? They owe it to us to provide us with a Social Security benefit. They owe us!

This post is long enough. I think I'll end it here even though it's a bit abrupt. Can't wait to dig into Ch. 1.

(Note: In Esolen's example of the Greco-Roman myth about Apollo and the virgin nymph, he mistakenly calls the nymph Diana. It is in fact Daphne.)