She forgot about the stars… and stopped taking notice of the sea.
So she put it in a bottle and hung it around her neck.Īnd that seemed to fix things … at first.īut as Simone Weil knew when she considered how resisting our suffering splits the psyche asunder, and as Rilke knew when he wrote that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” the little girl soon finds out that locking away the pain also locks away her capacity for love and aliveness.Īlthough, in truth, nothing was the same. With exquisite subtlety and economy of words, Jeffers - whose mastery of the interplay between darkness and light extends as much to the paintbrush as it does to the psyche - silently uncorks the outpour of hollowing emotions engendered by loss.īut if grief is so disorienting and crushing an emotion for adults, how are unprepared little hearts expected to handle its weight? The little girl cannot, and so she doesn’t.įeeling unsure, the girl thought the best thing was to put her heart in a safe place. We witness the duo’s blissful explorations until, one day, we realize that the father is gone - the little girl finds herself facing the empty chair. Jeffers tells the story of a little girl, “much like any other,” whose expansive and exuberant curiosity her father fuels by reading to her all sorts of fascinating books about the sea and the stars and the wonders of our world. And nowhere is there more heartening an antidote than in The Heart and the Bottle ( public library) by the inimitable Oliver Jeffers. Nowhere is this disservice clearer than in how we address children’s experience of life’s darkest moments, as evidenced by the minuscule the pool of intelligent and imaginative books that help kids make sense of death and loss.
You have to write up, not down.” And yet down we write still, deaf to White’s wisdom and to Tolkien’s insistence that there is no such thing as writing “for children” and to Gaiman’s crusade against the spiritual disservice of shielding children from difficult emotions. White famously asserted in an interview, admonishing: “Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. “Children … are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth,” E.B.
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