The Commons Spring 2017 | Page 15

STUDENT ESSAY
with my siblings in a blue paddling pool
shaped like a boat. The grass was the sea,
and we imagined we were stranded in the
middle of it: if you stepped out the sharks
would get you, we said. So we stayed in
the boat and sucked ice water through
straws to stay alive. What is key to a
child’s imagination is wonder. One could
say that a child is living a lie when he or
she makes a house out of a sofa, a blanket
and a broom. It is a lie. Yet it can be more
true than any house made out of brick or
stone or wood. For its truth comes from
the child’s delight and wonder in making
it. As C.S.Lewis himself put it,
Once in those very early days my brother
brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit
tin which he had covered with moss and gar-
nished with twigs and flowers so as to make it
a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first
beauty I ever knew. What a real garden had
failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me
aware of nature—not, indeed, as a storehouse
of forms and colours but as something cool,
dewy, fresh, exuberant,…as long as I live in
my imagination of Paradise will retain some-
a table, they see a shelter or a den. A ta-
ble is something that they can make into
a home, and they’ll plead to be allowed
to sleep in their “table-house.” An adult
looks at a table and sees a table. So it is
with puddles. To adults, puddles are for
dodging. No more. It is a kind of madness
to splash in puddle as an adult. Some will
smile, some will look worried–creases of
concern appearing as they wonder at the
sanity of such a person. A child, however,
enjoys a puddle for what it was made for.
Indeed, what else would God have made
puddles for? Each splash, each jet of water
that springs forth from under bike wheels,
spraying everywhere, is God saying, “I
made rain, and I made it for you.” A child
sees what puddles are, for he sees what
puddles are for. Puddles are for splashing
in; rain is for running in–face tipped up
into it. On your cheeks and in your eyes
and dripping off the end of your nose.
Rain spells out God’s delight.
Within all this we see that a child’s
imagination is not confined to images in
the mind: it is real. Indeed, it can be more
thing of my brother’s toy garden. 3
that is crying. A child’s fantasy is often
the adult’s everyday, the adult’s mundane
Monday morning. And a child delights
in it. A child imagines it again and again.
But as they grow up, they slowly and sure-
ly enter the real world; they stop living in
their heads and start living in the world,
until finally they reach the point when
they are adults and houses are no longer
the table in the dining room but rent to
be paid. Yet the child’s imagination is a
vision. It sparks missions and inspires
real life. A child can make shoebox into
treasure trove, or a paddling pool into a
sail boat. I remember when I was maybe
seven or eight, sailing round our garden
3
Through imagination the world is made
new; for, imagination makes it exciting.
We grow out of such imagination, such
vision (for imagination is a way of seeing
things). And it is then that the world be-
comes mundane. We “grow up” and the
world grows old and weary with us. Snow
becomes a hazard, no longer an adven-
ture. People will often say, “I wish I had a
child’s imagination, their way of seeing the
world.” That is because a child, in imag-
ining their own world and copying the
world, finds wonder and excitement in it.
It is because of imagination that a child
can look at even a puddle and be delight-
ed. For a child when it sees a puddle,
sees an opportunity, an opportunity to
laugh at himself and the wetness and the
splash: he sees a puddle for what it was
made for. An adult sees an inconvenience.
In the same way, when a child looks at
Dragons might not be
“real” in the way adults
view reality, but we still
fight dragons everyday;
we employ shovels as
swords against an
enemy that is not of
our imagination.
real than an adult’s vision of the world.
A child’s imagination is their vision, their
dream, their ideal. In fighting a dragon,
they wish to be strong, to be conquer-
ors. Dragons might not be “real” in the
way adults view reality, but we still fight
dragons everyday; we employ shovels as
Kevin Charles Belmonte, Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life and Impact of G.k. Chesterton (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, ©2011), 4.
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