As fine praise as could be offered
Between the ages of about three and five, and perhaps for some time thereafter, I can recall being read Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories on a fairly regular basis…almost a nightly basis. My dad had a very engaging and entertaining way of reading them, and to this day I am occasionally known to let the phrase “insatiable curtiosity” past my lips.
And I find I quite agree with David Warren’s quite excellent praise for the book and the virtue it served to inculcate in me:
Kipling — perhaps our greatest 20th-century prose author in English — was a satirist of the deepest kind. I say “deepest” because on the surface he is hardly a satirist at all, except in some rather overtly political verses; and even those are subtly loaded with paradox, under the surface. In the Just So Stories he was not merely trying to enchant young children, as adults think he was doing. He had a mind too knowing for that kind of play. He was instead arming his young readers to defend themselves against the faithless simplicities of their adult keepers.
No modern writer is quite so subversive as Kipling. And at the heart of him you find, in Just So Stories, the Jungle Books, and everywhere, this shining truth: that faith, good faith, good loyal faith, transcends all “explanations” of the unexplainable.
Note to self: retrieve copy of Just So Stories from Mom & Dad’s.
Warren’s larger point in heaping such fine praise on Kipling has to do with the tendency of modern materialists to lean on evolution — and in particular evolutionary psychology — as a means of explaining away everything, from love to charity (as a moral precept) Not that there are not natural components to these things; there certainly are. But neither is that all there is to them; they are not dysteleological.
And it’s good to inculcate kids against thinking in such absurd terms. Which I agree is one of the charming benefits of things line the Stories; they really help numb the power of “QED”-type statements, whether made by fundamentalists of the religious or atheistic variety.
