Letter #232: Lost Enchantment

The Magic is Still There

Mine son.

An early love of mythology seems to run in our family. I had a picture book of Greek myths when I was little. It captivated me. It even enhanced my delight in star-gazing when I realized the constellations included some of my favorite characters: Perseus, Andromeda and the Kraken from the sea.

When your sister was little, she had an elevated bunk-style bed to maximize the room in our small apartment. Sometimes I would sit underneath and tell her stories while she lay out of sight over my head. I remember telling her the myth of Perseus. When I finished, there was a long pause. Then her little voice filtered down from above. “That’s a GOOD story!”

As a young man, I read Ovid’s Metamorphosis. The ancient Roman weave-work of the myths is still one of my favorite poems. My first published novel, Face of the Earth, was inspired by it. The novel is an early attempt, almost juvenilia, but its theme sticks with me. Set on the roads I had hoboed on across America, it tries to express my sense that mythology is real. Myths rise from the earth like morning mist. They imbue the stories we tell which, in turn, reveal us to ourselves.

It's often said that science has “disenchanted” the world. Where before, men saw fairies in the forests and demons in the dark, they now perceive only clockwork, chemicals, and chains of reaction.

In Ross Douthat’s new book Believe, he makes the case that the mythic and magical are still there, but we have become blind to them. As evidence, he tells the story of a German lady who kept a broken radio as an heirloom. It had belonged to her late grandfather, who had helped raise her. The radio never worked until the lady’s wedding day. Then suddenly it began playing love songs. After that, it stopped and never played again. The twist to the tale is that the man she was marrying was Michael Shermer, an atheist, who edits the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, dedicated to debunking the supernatural.

I love such stories about ghosts. I often ask people if they’ve encountered a ghost, and they often have, sometimes very convincingly. But I’ve never seen one. As a man of my time, I suppose I’m just as blind as anyone else.

Recently, though, I’ve begun to feel my sight coming back to me. The everyday world lately seems to me shot through with consciousness. The angels and demons are still there, all right. You can trace their activity with more accuracy than you would think. And while they remain invisible to me, I do hear them speak sometimes in dreams.

These night visions may be a form of hallucination but, as you’ve suggested, hallucinations might be more real than our disenchanted reality. It may be that we are, to borrow an image from Keats, like Adam when he dreamed of Eve and woke to find her there.

Love, Dad