The spying heart
The basic task of education is the care and feeding of the
imagination. Indeed, the earliest form of education was the telling of
stories. But nowadays stories have been relegated to the realm of the
frivolous. Education has chosen to emphasize decoding and
computation rather than the cultivation of the imagination. We can
decide which year we’re going to teach which fact, function, or word,
and we can give a child a multiple-choice test at the end to see if he has
got it. We want our mathematics and our mythology strictly
compartmentalized, for we know instinctively that the imagination is a
Katherine Paterson
The Spying Heart
New York, E.P. Dutton, 1989
wild, hardly tamable commodity. There is no way to measure it
objectively, so anything in the curriculum that has to do with the growth
of the inner life of a child we tend to classify as a frill and either shove it
to the periphery or eliminate it from the curriculum altogether.
I remember my shock when I was taken on a tour of the new
school in our neighborhood. I saw the classrooms, the gymnasium, the
industrial arts class, the home economics lab — “But,” I protested, “it
seemed to buy any thread?
The longer he had to wait, the more he yearned to peep
into the room until, at last, he put his hand upon the door.
“Ah!” carne a voice from within. At the same time
Yohei cried out in horror and fell back from the door-way.
doesn’t have any windows.” “Oh,” said my guide, “studies have proven
What Yohei saw was not human. It was a crane,
that if a school has windows, students will waste a great deal of time
smeared with blood, for with its beak it had plucked out its
staring out of them.” I didn’t say anything, but I know perfectly well that
own feathers to place them in the loom.
the only way I survived my public school education at all was the fact
that there were windows through which I could stare out.
Ah, I thought, when I read this. That is what art is all about. It is
The growth of the imagination demands windows — windows
weaving fabric from the feathers you have plucked from your own
through which we can look out at the world and windows through
breast. But no one must ever see the process — only the finished bolt of
which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just
goods. I must trust the weaver of thoughts and dreams within and leave
this way.
her to work as she will. Reason and greed and impatience and curiosity
The story gives us a language for the unknown. It shapes chaos
for us and fills it with meaning. But in order to do this for us, the story
must ring true. It must tell us something we already know but didn’t
realize we knew.
So often we demand creativity out of the blue. We ask the
children simply to express themselves, and when they flounder in this
must be kept in check. Else someday I may wake up and find the crane
wife has flown away.
to let the child identify with a concept alien to toddlers.
impossible task, we blame TV and arcade games for robbing them of
“Thank you for The Crane Wife. Why it came when it did, and why I
their imaginations. Now, it occurs to me that perhaps people don’t have
read it to Matthew when I did, and why he thought of it when he did,
much in the way of imagination to start with. We may have images
are all beyond my ken. But thank you anyway, from us all.”
buried deep inside, but the imaging, the imagining, the spying of the
Thanks are in order, but not to me.
heart — the deep connection of those images that comprise the inner
The wounded crane who comes back in the form of a young
life with corresponding images in the world outside ourselves — and the
woman sets up a loom and closes it off with sliding paper doors. Then
language or the artistic skill with which to express this connection —
she says to her simple country husband, “Please, I beg you, I beg you
these are what must grow and develop.
never look in upon me while I am weaving.”
We start this process of nurturing the imagination when we read
The effort of weaving seems to exhaust the young woman, yet
to children while they are still far too young to understand the words.
the fabric she weaves has an unearthly beauty, and her poor husband
We read them the old stories, of course, but we also share with them
can sell it at a great price. But, as time goes by, he becomes greedy and
other works of the imagination. A child who is struggling with all the
consumed with curiosity when he is exiled to the other side of the
wild things within himself sits snuggled close to his mother and is deeply
sliding doors.
comforted. Even though his wild self may sail across the seas, he can
come home again to where his supper is waiting — still hot.
Yohei, no longer the simple fellow that he had once
Last year I was speaking at a conference. They wrote me and said
been, began to wonder about certain peculiar things. Why did
that in addition to my talk, they were planning to have a panel, two
the young woman appear to grow thinner every time she
psychiatrists and a social worker, to discuss the use of books with trou-
wove? What was going on in there behind those paper doors?
bled children. Since I don’t want anyone telling a child what he should
How could she weave such beautiful cloth when she never
get out of one of my books or any book I care about, for that matter, I
declined to be on the panel. But I did sit at the back of the room and
listen.
day long.
“Next day, first thing, in came a lady about forty years old,
They never diagnosed a child and then prescribed a particular
carrying a lovely little two-year-old girl.
book. They read widely themselves and had available in their offices
“The lady said, ‘This little girl needs a book about death.’
many books. The child always makes his own selection. There is no
“I replied, ‘Give me a clue. Was it a dog or a cat or a grandmother?’
suggestion that he is to report to me what he has learned. If he doesn’t
“ ‘No, her father shot her mother and then shot himself.’ ”
like a book, either because it doesn’t speak to him or speaks too
I had exactly the same reaction when I first read the bookseller’s
threateningly for him to listen, he simply stops reading.”
letter as you are having to the story as I repeat it. To our knowledge, no
I’d like to share with you a story that came in a letter from a
one has ever written a book for a two-year-old child whose father has
woman who owns a children’s bookstore in New Mexico. It has to do
murdered her mother and then killed himself. Even if such a book had
with a book I did not write, but that I had translated from Japanese into
been written, I cannot imagine that it would have been published or
English.
that any of you would have purchased it. There are no how-to’s for
“This is what happened,” the bookseller said in her letter to me,
“when I got my single solitary copy of The Crane Wife.”
human tragedy. There are, however, works of the imagination that can
minister to human lives in mysterious ways. The bookseller who wrote
“It came all by itself, like a dust devil. I opened it up and put it on
me said that while she was standing in shocked silence mentally
the desk, meaning to take it home and read it, but my three-year-old,
rejecting one book on death after another, her son said, “What about
who goes to work with me every day, insisted that we read it. So I did,
The Crane Wife?”
while a customer was browsing, quite unattended. I was reduced to
“I had my doubts,” she continued, “what with the blood scene
pitiful tears for a long while. Matthew was quite affected, too. We put
and all. But the lady took it. She came back later in the week and told me
the copy back on the shelf of new books and looked at it suspiciously all
that it had indeed helped smooth over the lumps, to open up the tears,