Fairy Tales

I’ve long worked in the realm of fairy tales. As a professor of theatre and practitioner of Shakespeare, I have grown an entire life around the adult practice of making or retelling fairy tales in one way or another – The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, All’s Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline, Timon of Athens, and Pericles all strike me as using fairy tale material. A few years ago, I had occasion to take a course in fairy tales in my graduate program in Liberal Studies, where I encountered everything from fairy tale typologies to cross-cultural archetypes, as we explored fairy tales that were either hundreds of years old or brand new. Just a couple of years ago, I acted in and directed a production of Into the Woods, a 20th Century take on fairy tales from the world of Stephen Sondheim and Broadway musicals. I once wrote a play that reset the story of Peter Pan, which I consider to dwell deeply in the dream-like world of fairy tales. I don’t know if I’m a more intelligent person as a result of these experiences, but I can say without question I’m a more imaginative and creative one.

Albert Einstein, widely regarded as an intellectual genius, suggests that “if you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” The idea that Einstein said this may, in itself, be a fairy tale of its own. This is part of the beauty and mystery of this attributed thought: we don’t know who said it, and yet it is wise. Fairy tales are like this. They contain deep, abiding human truths, but we are not always sure how they came to be. What we do know is that someone wanted to attribute this quote to Einstein, now an almost mythical figure in Western culture known for his intellectual genius, for a reason. Perhaps we want or need to hear Einstein, this emblem of intelligence, speak about intelligence in this surprising and provocative way. Our expectation is that Einstein will have our children bone up on math and science and other tools of his particular trade. Instead, we’re invited into something that feels antithetical and challenging. Fairy tales, says this most intelligent man, are the secret.

I believe Einstein is right. I believe that fairy tales are an expression of collective imagination – a way of dreaming together in community. Intelligence in such a setting lies in our ability to access, participate in, and stoke that collective dream. What’s important, claims the argument, is not the tools, but the imaginative way they’re used. To become a genius like Einstein, one doesn’t merely need to know the theorems and axioms of physics, but to creatively and wisely dream of how those things might be used to expand our horizons of knowledge and experience in whatever way. Such geniuses exist across time and culture: medieval artisans carving the stone of a cathedral just so, great poets and songwriters engineering words and evoking inspiration, innovative chefs and cooks using what they have to craft a transcendent sensory experience. Each of these kinds of genius moves us out of what we can expect and into new territory, forever changing the world in ways large and small.

Fairy tales are about more than imagination, however. Fairy tales are stories – containers of memory – that hold within themselves the trauma, values, and desires of the communities that formed them. Fairy tales are then a kind of wisdom tradition of a given community or culture. Intelligence here is not only about creativity and innovation and genius and the other hallmarks of outliers like Einstein, but about the threads we weave together with each other. Fairy tales are told in ritual. Fairy tales are told by mothers around firesides. Fairy tales are a way we raise children to become members of a given community. I remember learning in graduate school how many fairy tales – Cinderella being perhaps chief among them – are about processing the trauma of broken and blended families. In the tale, Cinderella has trouble with her stepmother and stepsisters. Her story is a mythic way of metabolizing the trauma of so many children whose mothers died, perhaps in childbirth, and who have to contemplate a life in a new family. Cinderella is then a dream about a redemptive escape or the arrival of righteous justice. All fairy tales are like this: they contain and contemplate our communal wisdom as a dream for a better life together.

As a father of children, a teacher, an artistic leader, and a hopeful future priest, I take the wisdom attributed to Einstein here greatly to heart. My wife and I have raised my children on the fairy tales of our day, from nursery rhymes and children’s tales read to them while they were young to Narnia and graphic novels and Marvel movies and The Lord of the Rings and Shakespeare. As a college professor of aspiring actors and directors and as the artistic director of the theatre company, I’ve taken as a calling the curation of a creative life of shared storytelling and ritual. As a Postulant, I anticipate a rich life of communal creativity and shared dreaming. It is this call to a deeper intelligence I share with Einstein and those who are the values of his attributed words. We are better when we are fully and imaginatively active within ourselves and sewn together with each other in community.