What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A reminder of childhood’s wonder,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

In honour of my son Theo, who is fifteen days old (and keeping me very busy), I am sending you this week two picture books, Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, both by the American writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak, who was born in 1928. These are the sorts of books that are never forgotten. You read them—or more likely they are first read to you—and they stay with you the rest of your life. I’m not exaggerating. Try it yourself: mention at random to people around you, “I was sent a book called Where the Wild Things Are,” and you’ll be amazed at the number of seasoned adults who break into a smile and exclaim, “Oh, that’s a wonderful book!”

There’s a lovely saying: the child is the father of the man. It applies to all aspects of an adult’s personality, but I think it does so especially with the imagination. From what the child imagines in dreams and fantasies comes what the adult will hold up as ideals. Hence the importance of children’s literature. The fundamental role of children’s literature is to encourage children to use their imagination. Because small as children are physically, large is what they can imagine. Sadly, a relation of inverse proportion sets in for many of us: as we grow in size, our capacity to imagine seems to shrink. And so we have adults with the most leaden, literal thinking, who are beholden to the real and the factual, adults whose imagination has so shrunken that they can’t even remember, let alone imagine, what it was like to be a child, even though that was once their real and factual condition, of being a child, who knows no gravity of the mind but can float and leap to any place. If the expandable imagination of a child’s mind is not expanded, then it will shrink all the more, all the harder, when that child grows up. The consequence is more dire than simply an adult with a dull, narrow mind. Such an adult is also less useful to society because incapable of coming up with the new ideas and new solutions that society needs. A skill is a narrow focus of knowledge,  a single card in a deck. Creativity is the hand that plays the cards. Hence, once again, the importance of children’s literature.

We read (present tense) as adults because we read (past tense) as children, and we are fully alive adults in the present because in the past we were fully alive children. Books are a key link between those two states. So I encourage you not to rush through Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, short though they are. Let them have their slow, deep effect. In Where the Wild Things Are, ask yourself what Max’s state of mind is and why that should be his state of mind and what it might mean. Is Max’s relationship with the monsters what you would expect? In In the Night Kitchen, who do the cooks with their narrow moustaches remind you of? What then might it mean when Mickey escapes the batter and floats away from the oven? In other words, I would suggest that you not just read these books (and aloud, even better), but imagine them.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen are the first two books of a trilogy. If you enjoyed them, you can try to find the third book, Outside Over There. It’s a joyful hunt, the hunt for a book.

encl: one hardcover book and one trade paperback, both inscribed

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