A Soft Modern Fiction about the Difficult Art of Resting on the Just Point of Adequacy – The Marginalian

Seeking the dangerous margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that reveals your peace, the hammer that shatters your wholeness – wanting anything to see your life incomplete without it. It is a perpetual motion machine that keeps rotating without resting in a sufficiently stationary position. “Enough pleasure is too great, I think it is impossible, only sad fakes,” cried Emily Dickinson in a love letter a century before Kurt Vonnegut, in his shortest and most poignant poem, discovered the secret of happiness in the sense of enough. Wanting is a matter of lack that writes itself in the scroll of the mind, turning itself into an equation that is read on the board of truth. That story is world history. But it shouldn't be its future, or yours.

An epoch behind John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan — John Ciardi's 1963 epic anti-religion essay — writer Martine Murray and artist Anna Read, who both live close to nature in rural Australia, offer a powerful new myth The Questing Monster (public library) — an almost unbearably beautiful modern fairy tale about who we will be and what this world would be like when we finally arrive, tired and free, in a place that is good enough. Since I've always felt that good children's books are works of subtle philosophy, telling great truths in gentle language, I hold this one among my all-time favorites.

The story begins in a town so peaceful and content that no one notices the Questing Beast, who stands and sinks at the edge of the scene, part ghost from Norse mythology, part Sendakian Wild Thing.

So the Questing Beast storms off to the next village, “screaming and tumbling as monsters do,” but still the magpie sings, the bees buzz in the flowers, and the children play in the square. The Wanted Monster doubles down on the screaming and howling, but even Billie Ray, “the little kid from this town,” isn't listening.

This poses no small ownership problem:

What good was a monster if it couldn't cause trouble? If he can't even raise an eyebrow at a curly-headed toddler? The Seeking Monster was shy.

But then Mr. Banks, sleeping peacefully by the stream. With that “evil pressure” that answers the defenseless monster, the Seeking Beast howls its siren of need in the sleeping man's ear.

Mr. Banks started giggling. His heart began to beat.

A little sadness felt in his mind.

What could possibly be wrong?

It was a perfect day to snooze by the creek. But now he wanted something, something more.

Suddenly, looking for the stream itself, it glistened attractively in the must-have sunlight.

As soon as Mr. Banks builds a swimming pool at his house and fills it with stream water, Mr. Bishop peeks over the fence and begins “tossing and turning” with a restless desire to find his own pool.

She goes on like this with envy, that needy maid, until the streams begin to dry up.

Soon it was a drop.

The fish gasped and flapped, the frogs jumped, and the reeds withered and died.

Victorious and intoxicated with his power, the Seeking Monster now wonders how much damage he can do to these peaceful people. So it turns to Mrs. Walton next, who gathers flowers in the garden for his dear friend Maria, and whispers in her ear.

Mrs. Walton began to frown and become worried.

He got angry. Why did he choose flowers for Maria when in fact she herself was the one who deserved it?

He should fill his house with flowers.

Yes, he must have the best smelling, most colorful, most stylish house in the whole village.

Everyone would be interested in you. Everyone will feel sorry for him.

Some women are watching Mrs. Walton picks up all the flowers he can carry, and suddenly they too are on fire with flowers. Soon, there are no flowers left and the bees lack pollen, the butterflies fly away, and the wrens and birds have no place to live.

The Questing Monster stomps through the flowerless fields, glowing.

That night, he visited Mr. Newton – the town's most ardent stargazer – and whispers in Mr. Newton.

Suddenly filled with the desire to have the stars, he goes into the forest and cuts down a big old tree to build himself a ladder, then climbs into the night and takes the star.

I am reminded here of this small portrait of William Blake, which I suspect inspired Read's art:

Mrs. Grimehart looks at Mr. Newton again, unable to carry the stars himself, cuts down not one but two trees to make a bigger ladder and plucks not one but five stars.

More and more stairs are going up and soon the sky is starless. With the stream gone and the flowers gone and the forest gone, the birds silent and the bees motionless, this peaceful little land finds itself landless.

The town was quiet, colorless and gloomy. The children cried. They loved their forest and their little stream. They miss the singing birds, the sunlit flowers, the shining stars.

People, unable to comfort the children, began to leave. The Questing Monster roars in self-congratulation.

At this point, everyone hears a roar and begins to wonder about the threatening presence. It was Billie Ray who first saw it and, pointing, told the townspeople that there was a monster among them. Naming a hurt is a way to open space for healing – as soon as a little girl names the hurt, everyone sees it as plain as daylight. Suddenly, the Questing Beast grows no bigger than a “beetle.” Only those things we do not fully know have the power to control.

But when the adults want to pounce on the little beast, Billie Ray stops them, leans down and asks the helpless creature if it needs a hug.

The Seeking Monster climbed into his palm. After all, it was tired and the hand was soft and warm. It lay down. Billie Ray took his other hand to make a roof, then wandered towards the dry riverbed, where she sat on its bank and began to wave her hand and sing the song her mother used to sing to her.

No one has ever sung a Wanted Monster before. And it had never been taken care of. And the Questing Beast didn't quite know what those things felt like – not at all.

Listening to the song, the Seeking Beast begins to cry. “There,” Billie Ray comforts, “Oh, dear heart.” The Seeking Monster does not know how to tolerate all this tenderness – how many of us really are – so it continues to cry “sad, endless tears” that begin to fill the stream.

Everyone else, listening and watching, began to cry.

A loud wailing filled the village.

Tears flowed in a stream, ran like a river…

The captives were released; which had been dry, flowed.

What was hard became soft again.

People unpack their suitcases, take stars out of their pockets, start collecting seeds, till the soil, and fill watering cans to replant trees and flowers.

As the birds return and the night gathers again, the Questing Beast finally stops crying and, looking up at the stars that fill the earth with all that abundant beauty, feels, at last, destitute.

A couple The Questing Monster with Fausto's fate – Oliver Jeffers' family tale inspired by Vonnegut's poem – and revisits Wendell Berry's how to find enough.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photos by Maria Popova