Somewhere in a grey building in a grey city, there is a committee of very serious folks, who have slits where their mouths should be. Their job is to decide what books have Substance. And their main finding, after years of very serious study, is that your posture is terrible. Sit up straight.
This is the Department of Grave Ideas.
I work there. I’m just a teacher though, so all-in-all a low-lying member of the establishment. Mostly, I deliver the grey, heavy envelopes full of Substance to the children. I tell them to open up Lord of the Flies, a story that presumes a group of British schoolboys are about three days away from becoming a murderous cult. Then we can cozy up, and settle in for a long talk about colonialism. Or we might read Of Mice and Men, so they can learn that the world breaks everything that is gentle. This is Substance. This is Important. And the kids have to eat it.
But the truth is, I have another shelf. I always have, even when I was much more concerned with seeming serious. It requires getting down on my hands and knees, away from the shadow of Bell Hooks and Socrates, to where no schools of thought are ever born. Down there, in the company of little floor critters, I found my real friends. They are dog-eared, stained, and deeply loved. They have spaceships on the cover, or a detective who drinks, or a poet who saw a bird and didn’t try to make it a metaphor for God. These are not the books I ought to read.
This is the shelf I want our kids to build: a place where big-ass swords and buxom maidens can live right alongside the profound. I want to show them that the two often wear each other’s clothes. The Department of Grave Ideas teaches that a book is a tool for prying open the human soul, which is apparently a very grim and complicated piece of machinery. But a book can also be a friend, someone who pulls up a chair, cracks its tired spine, and says, “Just wait ’til you hear this.”
Now, the Department isn’t the only one with an interest in how our little ones are going about growing up. Of late, the whole country is full of professional Kid-Brain architects, and there’s a lot they want to fit in there.
But most of them, in my estimation, have forgotten what a new, fresh brain is for. It’s a workshop for building a birdhouse with three entrances and no floor. It’s for making up new holidays. It’s for gluing a feather to a rock and calling it a spaceship.
Our most important job is to make sure they have a good supply of feathers, time, and nonsense, and then get the hell out of the way.
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