“Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.”Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “The Grand Inquisitor”
It is heartening to know that there are young children still reading books. While a growing majority of parents, who aren’t, have been seduced into destroying their children’s imaginations by placing them in front of screens, there are still holdouts who realize that if their children are ever to become free-thinking adults, they must grow up expanding their minds in the meditative space of beautiful literature on paper pages. Only there will they find the freedom to dream, to stop and close their eyes as they travel through unknown realms of wonder.
I know young children who are doing that; my grandchildren are. They are doing a most dangerous thing: they are thinking. They are purposely cut-off from the madding crowd that is lost in the disorienting madness of electronic cyberspace.
I have seen some children reading a book that has them thinking about the meaning of freedom, what it means to be an autonomous and courageous individual in a country in which brainwashing has been refined to a fine psychological art, and normality has been proffered as a great achievement by a corporate media serving as stenographers for the power elite.They are learning a profound lesson: that the crowd is untruth and that to be a person one must of necessity stand out.
No, they are not reading Kierkegaard, Orwell, or Dostoyevsky. They are reading a writer who sounds the same themes but speaks the language of 9-12-year-olds, a supremely intelligent writer of beautiful prose who never condescends to write down to them. They…