Longaevi in the Cathedral?

When I was a child, I read many fairy tales. I didn't mean to... I wasn't particularly enthralled with them. But nevertheless, somehow or other I read all that I have ever strayed across. I know all the usual ones--Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Cinderella--but also many unusual ones from around the world, and much mythology. My interior world was familiarly inhabited by the wise, laconic Norse myths; the amorous sweet Greek and Latin tales; and the strange stories of Egypt. I read fairy tales from Russia, Germany, England, Italy, Spain, and Turkey. I knew both Ali Baba and Baba Yaga. I also knew Lewis, MacDonald, and Tolkien.

It is odd to think, now, that I did not then notice the harsh violence and utter mysteriousness of those stories. The fairy tale world is not particularly safe, nor unambiguously happy in ending. Lewis understood. His Til We Have Faces shows an storyteller who knows better than to spoil things by explaining them completely. He has a sense of that which is completely other---that which is holy.

For all my reading, I never thought much about fairies. Then, in college, early in my freshman year, they became all at once real to me. I remember the moment. It was perhaps the middle of September. Deeply troubled because I could not find a place on campus to be alone (that was one of the things that most irked me at first), I went to stand on the far side of the pond. The water was like cobalt, like midnight and blue velvet. A breeze ruffled its surface, so that the lighted windows reflected there were broken into a thousand dancing golden points.

All at once, I thought of her, the water sprite. I imagined her infinitely lonely and still, with a sharp, lovely face and fierce--no, wistful--eyes. She was beneath the shimmering water, yet I saw her clearly, all pale in the cloudy darkness of her hair. She had no name, and perhaps never will have. She was the image of my longing to be alone, but she was too much alone, and I was in awe of her, and yet I ached for her loneliness. I believed in her until the end of my Junior fall, and then she blew away, like silver dust before a hot wind. Every day, passing back and forth behind Red Hill, I pause to look out over the water--but she is not there. Yet I do not stop to look for her; I stop because the pond's beauty, in all its many moods, leads me to think of God.

Well, she is gone. About the time she vanished, I read The Discarded Image for the first time and learned the term Longaevi. I fell in love with it, with them, immediately. About that time, too, the gazebo appeared on campus. Instantly it was theirs. They inhabited it as the Longaevi inhabited Lewis' Medieval Model---a touch of wildness, an element of clinamen in the almost-too-orderly cathedral. I wanted to believe it them. I wanted it too much, for I ruined them with wanting. I made them into my dolls; I dressed them in colorful wings and gave them names and personalities. They became my "Pigmean Race"--I destroyed the wonder of their being with definition and description.

My friends and classmates laughed, for the most part. Some told me that I was too old to play at believing in fairies. I listened to them, and chided myself for "such foolishness." All during my first senior year I alternately pretended their existence and laughed at myself for pretending. Late last spring, I gave them up for good. "What nonsense!"

The "nonsense," however, was not so easily abandoned. Last spring I gave them up; and last summer people began to make comments. "The way you touch things," my mother said one day, out of the blue, "is so light and ethereal. So is your writing. You write like a fairy." And others: "Your quality is silvery" and "You seem not quite to be in this world." At last, during the fall semester, "You are like a fairy" and then finally "You are a fairy."

But I said, quick and low and harsh, "I don't believe in fairies." I thought nothing about them, except to flinch at the term. Longaevi had become a word of pain. I never wanted to be one, after all. They were only a trick, a toy, a bauble, a bright make-believe. The more other people--not just a few, but many--came to identify me with them, the more I resisted. You see, I had let them alone so long that they had ceased to be the creatures of my imagination, and became again what they are in Midsummer Night's Dream, in Tolkien, in Lanval, and in The Faerie Queene. They had somehow regained that quality of the mysterious, the awe-inspiring, the other.

Lately, my job has brought me back to Lewis' Discarded Image. Once more I skim the chapter on Longaevi, and once more I have to ask myself: "Do I believe in fairies?"

Well, of course not... in one way. I don't really believe that creatures like that exist. But the deeper question is this: "Am I familiar with awe?" I have been reading a book called Knowledge of the Holy, by A.W. Towzer. Towzer is deeply desirous that I should grasp God's otherness, His holiness. Towzer wants me to stand in awe of God mysterious, God wrapped in unapproachable light, God who is like so many things, and yet profoundly unlike anything I have ever known.

Do I believe that my structured, orderly, all-grown-up cathedral of a life is inhabited by a Spirit more untamed than any fairy I have ever read of; more passionate, more strange, more beautiful--and more frightening? Am I curious, eager, trembling, yet all alight? Do I know that I stand before that which I cannot control, influence, or even touch? Have I knowledge of the holy?

I cannot say. But there is some strange, sweet, elusive music that has begun to haunt the corners of my cathedral. I feel that I could learn again what it is to be struck dumb. I feel that there is some new magic in the air, something I thought I had lost during these last twelve months of struggling to overcome. I wish I could describe it, but perhaps the point is precisely my inability. It has been a long time since I last experienced something beyond description. Perhaps, in the task of enduring blows and being humbled by weakness, I have forgotten how to play. Perhaps I have forgotten the taste of delight.

I should like to remember.