the concrete needs of the peasants, he warned the m shortly before his death: “If chey ll me, I will ise again in the Salvadoran people.” As I look beyond the Ci ist model, ask myself ions that for me arise fiom the story of Jesus. Fist, incisive word and the symbolic sacrifice required if the present-day bate of politcal myths? Second, how can I coattib- ute to a community of physical and spiritual caring? And finally, in all my effors, how can I best nurtuce the holiness, tenderness, and beauty that will live on even when the powers prevail? THE THINGS INK MAY DO 4s, mainline 200 channels of crime-sene dramas, programs, and talk shows into your living room. My DVD ental store down the street, tall one, caries‘css aeipGe, digital blob that will soon subsume all books, magazines, rele- vision shows, and movies. ould be good news, We've filled our silos with such a vast ies no seven-year famine could depleee it. The irony— wealth, wee starving wo death are packaged by corporate minds to and reap the largest profit margin. They have the mt of potato chips, and we consume them accordingly al content. Bur when we'e lucky ‘enough to read or sce them, we usually dont have the time gest them, By the next day were on to the next thing, wl symbols and meaning passthrough us like watermelon seeds. Tm addicted to the fast-food story as much as anyone, II had the chance to take three months off to watch every ep a cheaply animated late sixties called Rocket Robin Hood. There was ‘one oft-repeated sequence in which a wide-eyed and very plump “THE THINGS INK MAY DO Friar Tuck sat at a well-aid feast table, taking a single bite out of an apple, « before tossing the remains ove his shoulder. metaphor for the way most of us consume. ‘We not only need less potato-chip entertainment and more real meals, we also need the hearth, the lodge, the pub fireplace to linger give ourselves some unbuttoned time to digese them. At the end of a 1968 book called The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E, Frankweiler, che eponymous Mrs. B. gives some advice to two children on the lam from their parents and holed up in the Metro- politan Museum of Ar T think you should learn, of course, and some day you should learn a great deal, But ou should abo have days swhon you allow whe it already in you to swell p inside ‘af you until it spuches everyting, And you can fel ie inside you. Ifyou never take time out to let that happen, then yo ust accumulate facts, and thay begin bo rattle around inside of you You can make noise with them, but never really fel anything with them, 1 bolls ‘Organicand local foods are on the rise facrory-made food and uapronounceable ingredients ae on the way out. Instead ‘our food down for fuel en route to the next scheduledco spend vime talking about where ic came from and who grew i years of counterculural plodding, the slow-food underway. The slow-story movement, however is In the mid-ninetcs, a certain talk show host encouraged mil- of women to start hosting book clubs. This may have been the kickoff to the slow-story movement in North America atthe ‘mass level. It basa long way to go yet. Fve never been in anything ‘Namely, fairy tales. Or rather, mythic tales—the stories of the soul that appear as fantasy, legends, and folklore 0 ‘Legends and myth ave largely made of ruth, and in- deed present aspects of it that can only be percoed in this mode: and long ago cermin truths and modes of thie hind wore dicovered and must always reappear.” IRR Tolle ‘ONE OF sev ravounrte places «0 spend an afternoos bookstore called Macleod’. A hoard of mercantile of old books—a dusty and comforting smell of disintegrating pages and powdery binding gluc. It’s the kind of bookstore that “THE THINGS INK MAY DO pulps and poctry anthol ind Rubaiyars. Antiquari the barrow-load, though they seem to exit much more slowly. Im. not sure wheze they put all the new arrivals, I picture catacombs highway, then Mac dloesat see much trafic. logy exploration of the images and symbols in ries—from the Arabian tale of Abu Kasem’ slippers a thousend-year-old Kashmir tle, about a king who must an- ower sxenty-fve riddles posed co him by the corpse om his back, ‘which, for complicated reasons, he has eut down fiom a tree and ritst deliver to a magician.) Downplaying his own expertise, readers co take off their socks and step into always newiy alive to the eyes that us, brushed in with the fresh ofl panes of personal experience. “It is because they are alive, potent to re- vive themselves, and capable of an ever-tenewed, unpredictablebut che dialogue of a _mporary and fiend of Cael Jung, and like ‘ceriain kind of story. The catchall han “flty tales.” which is too specific. Mythic stor- sclude not only fany tales but Greek drama, Goethe's ys (Hamlet and The “Myth is what lion,” someone ofice wrote. That's @ good jab at patochialism, bur doesnt explain what myth means, ‘or why it grabs us. As Tolkien points out, myth is erueh, Truth In myth, truth is always found in the relationship berween the reader and the story. One man reads Hans Christan Andersen's The Snow Queen and koows that the fairytale describes the glass splinter in his own eye, the one disposing him to see the ugliness rather than the beauty in every- thing, The story speaks directly to him, He feels himself hailed— ‘or naled—by it, and he senses that the way to wash the splinter cout is revealed, somehow by the storys ending. Exactly how to 1 spelled out, but the hint is ‘enact the due inthere, w This is noe to sy that non-mythi have les value. Good stories of any kind sideswipe us: historical dramas like Schindler’ Lia, ot gorgeous, sensualist fictions lke ‘THE THINGS INK MAY DO (Oscar Hijuclos’ The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Well-erafted licerature draws us into other lives, other losses, so convincingly ‘miracle of the human imagi deeply chat we forget where were actually sitting —in bed eating crackers or in asticky-floored multiplex with 2 and feel so much for people we know aren human beings do. ts where we lve, ifs what in a web oft constant” said the husband of friend of mine, an actor who's been performing on stage and teaching for over forty years, “Everything we are noc experiencing physically in the mo- “Maybe whales do tell stores at the botcom of che 1 as we know we are che only animals on the planet sho can conceive of what is nat” . ind the save, ora beow-beaten gil ‘ut of the fiteplace ‘more than cultism that Keeps people reading the Torah and cheNew Testament. Ie must be more than academic canons and literary pretension that keeps Greck tragedy, Arthurian legends, and Shakespeare alive. But what isi? Why have Grimm’ Fairy Tes been popular for 200 years, or the tales of King Arthur for almost a thousand? Why has The Hobbie, wrieen in 1987, sold more than 90'million. Joyee's version ges turned into a pig by an island sorceress. This is ‘what puts Harry Potter in the same rowboat with Odysseus, Cin- , and Prospero. The word “magic” has appropriately mys- pare of our intelligence. North Ame! the presence of what is not possible, by the miraculous that exists ‘outside our daly grind, And who knows: if we spent more time bridging our everyday lives with che world of myth, those rules we ‘good rationalists believe are so fixed might elx abit. ‘THE THINGS INK MAY DO “The Western reader . . . has to be roused from his old in- grained way of thinking in order to awaken him to anocher! of things,” Hensy Corbin said four decades ago. 4.ncw term forthe inner verrain where we experience dreams, vi- sions and mythic symbols: the mundus imaginal He was careful agination allows us to enter a threshold world—"the country of non-where,” in the phrase of 12th-century Persian philosopher Sohrawardi—which bridges the conscious world with the inner ‘world of the psyche, and the spiritual reality beyond, Peyche: that creaky-foored house with high-windowed rooms, ‘garden courtyard, adark basement, and several padlocked closets ‘here are apparently worthless qualities in us that, seen with a new eye, turn out to be beautifl. Ashes to roses, seraw to gold. “The aim isto awaken in ourselves the old ability 0read with intuitive understanding this pictorial scrip, that at one time was the bearer of the spiritual sustenance of our own ances- tors” Zimmer wrote, “The answers to the riddles of existence thar the tales incorporate—whether we are aware of the fact or not— are sill shaping our lives.” “Siris make ws mare alse, mare human, more courage es, mor loving, Why dos anybody tla srg It dest eed have someting 1 da with fit faith thet be univere ‘ay mooning, that ow isle baman Bs are notion, thes what we chase o7 uy 0 do mater, mater conical” Madeleine UEagle IN HINDSIGHT THE PLACE where I grew up—abandoned dairy farms, hayficlds slowly being overtaken by forests of alder—was ppestoral, Ie fle that way on summer vacation, when my cousin and I would ride to the store to buy snow cones, or stay home and pelt each other with windfall apples. But ia autumn the days turned ominous with wind and drizle, giving my favourite 3p Twas drm fare ssa sties, ftom vihich JK. Rowling likely poached ther idea oF a school for young wizards I read them al greedily, fet up on our familys couch, gobbling baked beans and gilled- cheese sandwiches, "TH THINGS INK May D0 1 was equal-parts insccure and arrogant as a boy, not much