Fantastic power
Commonplace book
“Writers of fantasy for children have a heavy responsibility: anything they write is likely to have a profound affect for the next fifty years. You can see why if you ask ten adults which book they remember best from their childhood. Nine of them will certainly name a fantasy.
“If you enquire further, you will find your nine adults admitting that they acquired many of the rules that they live by from this book that so impressed them. This may not exactly mean rules of morality-- though it may-- but wider things like what ways of behaving are wise, or unwise; or how to spot a person who is going to let you down; or what frame of mind in which to face a disaster; or possibly the way you look at life in general.”
- Diana Wynne Jones (2012). Reflections on the Magic of Writing. Oxford and New York: David Fickling Books, 46-47.
I had long imbibed and respected from my own experience and from Diana Wynne Jones’s novels that a lot of bad magic is done when and only because its victim give verbal assent or admission-- as a mere adult reader of DWJ. It was very helpful in identifying my seminary internship supervisor as a witch.
Furthermore, temporal planning horizons must be extended.
Illustration: Painting Skeleton Fantasy Show (骷髏幻戲圖) by Li Song (1190–1264). By Li Song - www.epochtimes.com/i6/707191848431369.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9014408
I've been noting elsewhere and I'll note it here too: I think my generation, with a substantial number of kids who absorbed Mr Rogers Neighborhood and Sesame Street and much that followed, also absorbed what now are almost cliches about self-care and self-love, affirmation of love and respect for children, and imagination as an acknowledged and important distinct thing (e.g. the land of make-believe, and Mr Snuffleupagus). And as someone raised by secularists busy saying no to Jesus and trying to replace religion with (often self-serving) pop-psych, stories of magic were I think a way of finding a miraculous yes that I could live within for a moment or two. And that has definitely been essential to who and what I am at 60.