Attention and Imagination

A Reminiscent Look at George MacDonald's 'Little Daylight' Republished by Mike Wilhelm

A PALACE CANNOT TRULY BE CALLED A PALACE unless it has a forest nearby-preferably very close. The closer the better. It shouldn’t be completely surrounded by trees, as a palace should be open to the sun and wind, standing brave and tall with shining weather vanes and flying flags. However, there must be a forest on one side of it. The king who was to be Daylight’s father had a magnificent forest next to his palace, so grand that no one had ever reached its far end. Close to the palace the forest was well-kept and clear of underbrush, but as you moved further in, it became wild and untamed…

So opens George MacDonald’s fairy tale Little Daylight. These opening lines immediately swept me back to my childhood in southern Nevada where I loved to play in the groves of mesquite trees that grew along the bank of the Muddy River. In my mind, even to this day, “the big trees” was a real enchanted forest.

From the kitchen window of our trailer, there appeared to be two groves of these dark, gnarly mesquite trees, a small grove where my mother could still watch me when I played, and a big grove that was deeper and darker, more mysterious, with an old, broken-down car deteriorating in its shadows. We called these two groves… wait for it… “the big trees” and “the little trees.”

I was allowed to play in the little trees because, as I said, my mother could keep her eye on me from the kitchen window. I was not supposed to go into the big trees under any circumstances because she couldn’t see me there—plus, the big trees spilled down over the bank and grew along the edge of the river itself. And, the dangerous Muddy River didn’t get its name for no reason.

What I thought was unknown to my mother was that there was a little outcropping of stray trees that connected the little trees to the big trees. And, when I thought she wasn’t looking, I would occasionally sneak through the connecting grove of trees to the big trees to play in the car and explore the river. I was sure there were goblins and elves or bandits and treasures to be discovered in the big trees—maybe even the entrance to The Land of the Lost (ifykyk). There was an abandoned old car hidden in the big trees after all. So every time I went out to play in the little trees, the enchanted big trees called to me and begged me to come explore.

Those more than a few times that I gave into the enchantment and snuck into the big trees to play in the car and explore the river—thinking I was doing so unobserved—I eventually discovered something more valuable than undiscovered treasure. Since those were the days when parents still spanked and ne’er an eyebrow raised, you might call my discovery “a hard lesson learned.”

As a child, my imagination was enlarged because I spent most of my free time playing outside or reading books—lots of books. TV might consist of an hour of Saturday morning cartoons (e.g., Loony Tunes, Scooby-Doo, and maybe Fat Albert or the Jetsons) and an hour or so with the family after dinner (e.g., Hogans Heroes, Andy Griffith, and M*A*S*H). Otherwise, it was playing outside or reading books. We were a regular stop for the bookmobile.

Reading taught me to love stories, especially mysteries, adventure stories, and fairy tales i.e., Sinbad the Sailor (adaptations of The Arabian Nights) by Andrew Lang, Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, Grimms' Fairy Tales, The Hardy Boys Mysteries by Franklin W. Dixon (I won’t discuss how heart-broken I was when I learned Franklin W. Dixon was a pen name for a bunch of formulaic ghost writers…Lies! all lies! First Santa, then Franklin W. Dixon. What next? The Easter Bunny?)

Kidding aside, it was the abundance of stories like these that shaped my imagination as a child to look for the mystery, for the adventure, and for the unexpected, especially eucatastrophe (a word Tolkien coined, an one I didn’t learn until I was well into adulthood, but an expectation nonetheless). That’s why “the big trees” was something more to me than a mere grove of mesquites; it was a dark, gnarly enchanted forest that begged to be explored.

Something else I learned to love as a child were frame stories—a story within a story—like The Arabian Nights and later Narnia (in its own particular way), Frankenstein, The Princess Bride, and The Shadow of the Wind. To this day, these have remained some of my favorites.

Remarkably, Little Daylight is that kind of story, a story within a story. In MacDonald’s book At The Back of the North Wind, Mr. Raymond tells this story to two children who had endured some of life’s “hard places” trying to survive in Victorian London.

My Friend, Mike Wilhelm, recently republished Little Daylight as a stand-alone book, edited for a modern audience and beautifully illustrated by Lucy Hough.

Mike is the head chaplain and director of a residential childcare facility in Texas. He has a magnanimous pastor’s heart and gift for ministering to young people—especially those who have endured life’s hard places. He is not only a Christian committed to the gospel of Christ, but also a Christian humanist committed to the liberal arts, humanities, and the Great Books as essential for cultivating our moral imagination. In one part of his introduction to Little Daylight he insightfully observes,

Sometimes a fairy tale says it best. You’re growing up in a world of addictive reels, TikTok videos, and social media platforms that capture the attention while starving the imagination. Fairy tales, on the other hand, are different. They won’t take your attention captive through addictive technology. But if you give them your attention, they will feed your imagination and awaken your soul.

Little Daylight is a fairy tale worthy of our attention, a story that feeds our imagination and awakens our soul. It’s a fairy tale like you’d expect, with kings and queens, castles and forests, old witches and curses, adventures and “hard places;” but, ultimately it’s a story about hope, about daylight, a literary manifestation of Psalm 30:5: Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.

It’s the kind of story that inspired C. S. Lewis to write his own fairy tales and to tell his goddaughter, Lucy Barfield,” “But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.”

So, if you’re reading this, I hope you’re old enough (or still young enough) to read fairy tales because I want to commend this small and charming book and encourage you to add it to your reading list. After you finish it, I hope you read it to your own children and grandchildren. I know I’m going to read it to mine.

Back in the fall of 2022, Mike joined me on The Consortium Podcast to talk about the Great Books, Classical Christian Education, and the work of ministering to young people facing hard times. His own testimony is worth the listen.