(no subject)
A snippit from this interview with Chris Eccleston, discussing his role in The Dark is Rising and fantasy in general:
The 43-year-old from Salford, Lancashire, added: "I'd never heard of the books, but as a child I was one of those who was hugely passionate about The Lord of the Rings.
"I understand the passion people feel for these books, but I think they should be left for childhood. People say The Lord of the Rings were the greatest novels ever written, but no, they're not; they're childhood.
Which I would like to rebut with this quote from C.S. Lewis:
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
It strikes me that this a common problem: when you're growing up, you want to be grown up, to do grown-up things and have grown-up attitudes and grown-up knowledge and liberties. But while I despise the saccharine view of childhood that says it's all butterflies and cupcakes, or those insipid things people write or record "for children" that children only read/watch because they haven't developed their tastes, there's very much that's labelled "for children" that is just as good - if not better - for adults. Fantasy's one of 'em.
A child can be excited and amazed by fairy-tale worlds, by dragons and elves and things, but it's the parents who understand the real terror of dark things, the real possibilities of magic, and the real wonder of stepping from the ordinary world into Faerie.
I have a feeling that Eccleston's attitude toward the fantastic is part of the reason he deprived us of another year of his excellent Doctor. Which is too bad. Apparently it hasn't occured to him that it's adults who find awakened in themselves the terrible longing to leave all they know - all they're used to - and go travelling off into the farthest reaches of the universe, to see what no one has seen, to do what no one has done, and to discover that the world is so much wider - deeper, richer, stronger, even weirder - than the little corridor they live in.
I just had to rant, anyway, Any time anybody disparages fantasy, my immediate thought is, "Them's fightin' words!"
Have to work again today. Someday, someday we will conquer the Database of Doom and I can go back to having something resembling a life. ::searches for rock under which to hide::