Imagination

Whatever happened to Narnia?

When did imagination become a luxury?

It’s common knowledge that children are very flexible— running, jumping, and falling without a care, while as adults grow older they find it harder and harder to get off the floor. In some cases, this is true of imagination. Children often find it easy to dream and scheme all sorts of strange scenarios, and while we may struggle for a creative title, they never cease spouting names for each and every stuffed animal.

Why is this?

The answer seems quite obvious. Life happens. You grow up. There are pressures from all sides of society telling you the “harsh truth” that playtime is over. You can’t come back to Narnia. A man in his eighties can’t expect to leap like a deer.

But what if it wasn’t meant to be this way?

Imagination is one of the great qualities that sets us humans apart from animals. The imagination cannot be killed, but like any virtue it can be twisted or corrupted into something it was never meant to be. Both children and adults run. Children run and dance in the wind, laughing and chasing each other while enjoying the beauty of movement. When adults run, it’s often with watches and trackers and all the fanciest gear. They run, often alone, with no purpose except to please the clock and provide some sense of validation. Music pounds away any independent thought, and thus running becomes quite different from what it was. (Not that I am against running. I just needed an analogy.)

In the same way, the imagination can be “tamed” and “matured” until it no longer resembles what it once did. The imagination is stored away in a cupboard, only allowed a breath of fresh air when we want to conjure up some vision of the future, horrid or triumphant, more often than not simply twisted into anxiety. Perhaps we imagine what we would like to do to someone we find particularly annoying. Either way, it’s all a bit self centered. Occasionally we drag the tired imagination from its cupboard, and with a stick we beat out an essay or project that brings us no joy, keeping it on a tight leash. This is not to say that we should let it run entirely free. There is an aspect of growing older that requires discipline, but there is a difference between letting the monkey run wild and keeping it starved in a cage.

This cage is made up of noise and distraction. Whether it’s podcasts, music, background shows, we have a society that has collectively crippled its own ability to cope with silence and, more important, boredom. Most of mankind has lived in a quiet world, where there was a time for noise and a time for silence. The enlightened man, however, must not be bored, and thus has killed his own imagination. Even worse, the imagination is under attack from ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence programs that are designed to do all our pesky imagining for us.

Some suggest that the death of imagination is the progress of mankind. These same people suggest that virtue and religion are unfortunate blocks that stand in the way of a utopian future.

“Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.” - C. S. Lewis, Abolition of Man

It is when society most wants to numb and dull our imaginations that we must fight the hardest to keep them. Take some time to think, and let your imagination out for some air. Let there be silence and see what thoughts you find.

To those of you who think that Narnia really is for children and that the imagination has no love for maturity, I challenge you to take your fight to the Inklings. Or, if they aren’t large enough for you, take it up with God. Is He not the Creator, who imagined and then spoke the world into being?

“Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive – it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there?”

- Anne Shirley