Even Sweet Apples are Poisoned
A review of The Boy, the mole, the fox and the Horse, and myself.
I don’t remember the first time I saw an airplane. They were always overhead; I grew up under the approach to an air field. When I was young, airplanes meant something: freedom. The ability to transcend gravity, the F-15’s so freely streaking through the sky, impossibly high, unlimited by anything, that must be what real possibility felt like. As I grew older and read more and learned about the world, things changed. Airplanes still meant something, but now they were also meant to carry bombs, were designed to destroy other airplanes—were weapons. I grew still older and airplanes were machines that were wielded by pilots and politicians, and built by large organizations. They didn’t feel like pure freedom anymore. The airplanes were the same, but I had changed.
I loved reading The Boy, the Mole, the fox and the horse. I felt the sweet sorrow that the author poured into those pages, it made me feel joyful and nostalgic, and it made me mourn my own adulthood. My failure to read this book exactly as it was written, to accept it without reserve, is a celebration of its great function: to remind me of the things that make so much sense to children, and so many of us have forgotten. The aphorisms are comforting, the illustration is filled with a bleak hopefulness, the effect is addressed to the wounds that have slowly stripped my mind. Somehow I can’t take all of it seriously; echoes of claims of the harm of the virtue of meekness spoil the openness of my mind—how many mores are for the good of the many at the expense of the individual, and how many selfish mores abandon those with whom we ought be allied? It is exactly my instinctive ridicule that describes this book’s value; such reflexive rejection is tempered by forgotten hope. Though I can’t see an airplane without thinking of the provenance of the titanium of its turbines, I can still feel a thrill as it climbs above the clouds, unencumbered by the mundanity of adherence to the ground, and sails into the sunset.
One of the greatest powers we have to influence other people is in the construction of the narratives that undergird our reality. I suspect that with love, we instill in our children an ignorance of what we see as the ugliness of our experience in the world. I don’t know how we should describe the world to those who don’t yet understand the hazy, indistinct, and perspectival nature of so much of the human experience, but I think that blithe ignorance renders one unprepared for the harshness of nature, strict reality renders one inhuman and inflexible, and incomprehensible ambiguity renders one feckless. Every person is different, despite how much we all share, much of morality is constructed of the injustice of one’s lived experience, and often there are competing, incompatible versions of quite justified tragedies. Whether we should seek the summer of our youth, I’m not sure. Knowledge is freedom, but reality is a prison. I would recommend The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, by Charlie Mackesy, to anyone who struggles to accept themselves, as self hate does nothing good.
TL;DR I’ve lost my innocence, but that’s not so bad. This book reminds me of a less encumbered perspective. Pitfalls abound in describing the world to the naïve, but this book is a comfort.
