“What do you consider the lowest depth of sorrow?” the Proust Questionnaire asked David Bowie. “Living in fear.” In the time between Proust and Bowie, the young Hannah Arendt explored the eternal paradox of how to love and live with fear in her first published book, noting: “Fearlessness is what love demands. Such fearlessness exists only in a perfect calm that cannot be shaken by future events… So the only tense that works is now, the present tense.”
And yet the hallmark of our awareness of complex animals is our possible imagination – the ability to focus on the future and everything that could go wrong in it, knowing that at any moment we could make the wrong choice, knowing that even if there was a right one, and even if we had the intelligence to see it and the desire to do it, chance will always play a greater role than choice. This is the price we pay for the chance of the miracle of life at all, each of us an unlikely product of chance events that manifest over time our consciousness and its power of choice. (Just ask James Baldwin.) And so we find ourselves here, cosmic castaways living with the endless burden of looking forward into an uncertain universe, finding again and again in this burden the greatest blessings of beauty and meaning – the object of every theory and the subject of every work of art, traced to its deepest source.
How to live without fear but also, how to let it be our place of grace and beauty, is what artist Charlie Mackey explores. The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse (public library) – a serenade on life, in all its terrifying and fleeting uncertainties, sung in ink, watercolor, and wonder.
A book is less a story than a meaningful sensorium, rendered in spare words and emotive images. In a series of encounters and conversations with three other animals, each a keeper of a different kind of wisdom, the little boy confronts life's big questions: how to live with fear, what it means to love and be loved, where to find the deepest and purest source of fulfillment.
There is an Odyssean quality to the way they travel together, but it is not that of the archetypal hero's journey. At its heart is the celebration of friendship as life's highest cooperative heroism, which saves us from ourselves (the way whatever frees us saves us).
In the eyes of poor adults, this painted meditation can sometimes seem like the moral of a Zen parable or an Aesop fable, presented without the storytelling and poetic rewards of a parable or fable – too obvious, too simple, too small a fortune cookie. But wherever it risks becoming trite, the story is handled with compassion.
It helps, too, to remember to take Mackesy's hand into the situation in which the story unfolds — like a child with his eyes wide open in wonder, asking simple questions, which turn out to be deep questions, with an earnestness you don't know; it helps to remember Aldous Huxley's admonition against our fear of sincerity as he thought of two kinds of truth that all artists must reconcile, reminding us that while “not all obvious truths are great truths,” “all great truths are obvious truths.”
In this respect, this book feels like a spiritual heir Winnie the Pooh. And who, this side of 1943, would meet a fox in a picture book without thinking The Little Prince?
When I go through it, I find myself thinking about the Stoic strategy for overcoming fear: “If you would not have a man afraid when disaster comes,” wrote Seneca two thousand years ago, “train him before it comes.” Even better, this extraordinary book brings him closer, trains him before he becomes a man—train the child who becomes a man, the child who continues to live inside him, the eternal inner child Maurice Sendak made all his books for, knowing that the highest achievement of adulthood is “to have your child alive and living and something to be proud of.”
He is a completer The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse – many of the pieces Mackey made available as cards and prints – and poet Joseph Pintauro's wonderful old picture books for adults about life, love, death, and the wonder of uncertainty, then visit Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on myths and the importance of fear Nhaved Zen teacher Nhaved Zen to turn fear into love.
