Comment

Stan Grant
In the land of magical thinking

Whatever we may be remembered for, if we are remembered at all, I would suggest it is not magic. It is not that I believe we are without awe, that we have no sense of wonder or imagination. We are human after all and what was true for our ancestors is true for us: magic is essential to ward off despair.

What we lack is not magic, really, but the words for magic. We have surrendered the language of the soul. We have locked it away in the cupboard of childish things.

What a relief it has been for me to spend the past weeks in a world of magic. I have walked through cobbled streets lined with stone walls. I have gazed up at dreaming spires. I have wandered through parks of wild deer.

I stood at dawn in an enchanted forest where birdsong found harmony with a distant church bell. A thousand years a bell has tolled here, waking a sleeping village and calling the inhabitants to prayer.

In this magical place a wardrobe is a door into a fantasy world where children will battle the evil witch in a land of endless winter and a lion king will lay down his life to set the children free.

I step inside a churchyard and I am entranced by a fairy-book door shrouded by two yew trees. There is a rumour that I have reached the Doors of Durin, the entrance to the dwarven city of Khazad-dûm.

Just a rumour, of course. My imagination does the rest.

I have slipped the real world for the even more real world of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. I have gazed upon Einstein’s blackboard and I have wandered down a road in the footsteps of T. S. Eliot.

I have thought of time. Time present and time past and our place here between those two points, to be harassed by the thought that the pursuit of time is folly. Time cannot be redeemed or anticipated. As Eliot wrote, we remain “a perpetual possibility / only in a world of speculation”.

Olde England for me is still a refuge from time, a window through which I escape the new world. Like us all, I cannot bear too much reality.

In Oxford at this time of year, as the cold mornings warm into light-jumper afternoons, the sun sets later and as it does it casts a spell and anyone who cares to believe they can hear angels. The city kneels in prayer and prayer is a pledge to the beyond.

I have come here hoping some of this magic will rub off on me. I have come here to walk and think and read and maybe, if the words find me, I might write.

I have rented a cottage half an hour from the busy university town. The drive to my village takes me down narrow hedge-lined roads and past trees that in the dark seem to stretch and bend. They are grumpy trees with old-man faces.

Some of these villages have lyrical names, such as Stow-on-the-Wold. It is English that requires translation. I discover it means holy place on the hill. This is holy land. It has called to me since I was a boy and I would curl up on the floor of my great-aunt’s living room and lose myself in her prints of paintings of English pastoral life.

I lived in England for several years but then I was consumed by noise and news. London was a pit stop on a career in international journalism and I missed the magic. Journalism does not do magic. It is the opposite – it prefers the flinty ground of truth.

These days I afford myself the gift of wonder and wander. I drifted into a bookshop and was drawn to the title of a book called They Flew: A History of the Impossible, a story of levitating saints and flying witches.

The author, Carlos Eire, is a professor of history and religious studies at Yale University. He is a scholar of sober repute and knows that he is flirting with danger by writing about transcendence. Human levitation, he concedes, “seems incompatible with seriousness”.

Why is it that we consider such things as fancy or delusion but consider as real, indeed an article of faith, our economy? I would sooner put my faith in Saint Francis than a Wall Street banker who can make numbers disappear.

We have invented the economy. We have fashioned it out of the air. We have made an altar of money. The market is the arbiter of all things. We are caught in its spell. It is a world no more real than Narnia or Moria but far less entrancing and far more evil.

We have conflated money with freedom and the market with democracy. The West is a measurement of scale – the impossibility of growth – rather than a meditation of the soul.

Sadly, my spell is broken. I have returned to the Sturm und Drang. The news is full of portents of doom. Donald Trump is tearing up the rule book. His tariff regime will cast the world into depression. Democracy is under siege. The West is falling.

I don’t pretend an intricate knowledge of the dismal science of economics, but a good place to start, I would think, is to ask, what world are we defending? A charitable reading would argue we are richer today than at any time in human history. We might add that we live longer. We have anaesthesia, dentistry, Netflix.

Look closer, however, and humans are broken on the wheel. Entire communities have been hollowed out. Children report record levels of mental illness. Home ownership is a Ponzi scheme or an unattainable dream.

In America deaths of despair – suicide, gun violence, drug abuse – are at record levels. The rich are unseemly rich and the poor are abandoned.

Democracy? The votes of the elite, the rich and powerful count more than the votes of the common people.

The West? Surely the West is not a system. It is not a numbers game. It is not a vote. At its heart what makes the West, with its manifest failings, still so enchanting is the fact that it is magical.

From the ancient Greeks, people dreamt that dignity might live in us all, for no other reason than we are humans. That has held us in the darkest times. It is what I yearn for. It is not economy. It is magic.

On Trump’s liberation day, I spent the evening at a movie night in my little hideaway village. All the little people came. We watched a film about a group of women and their pilgrimage to Lourdes, the place of the vision of the Blessed Virgin. They went in search of a miracle and found that the miracle is themselves.

Walking home, my wife and I fell into conversation with a local woman. In five minutes she told us of her life, the death of her son and the unending pain. She told us she came to this village to make something good out of tragedy.

She could see the stars here. She said she and her boy loved to look at the stars. She looked heavenward and turned to me and said, it is magical, isn’t it? It might sound strange, she said, but it is magical.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 12, 2025 as "In the land of magical thinking".

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