Barking with the Big Dogs

by Natalie Babbitt

  the Water Rat followed the Adventurer league by league, over stormy bays, through crowded roadsteads, across harbour bars on a racing tide, up winding rivers that hid their busy little towns round a sudden turn … [And so] the wonderful talk flowed on—or was it speech entirely or did it pass at times into song—chanty of the sailors weighing the dripping anchor, sonorous hum of the shrouds in a tearing North-Easter, ballad of the fisherman hauling his nets at sundown against an apricot sky, chords of guitar and mandoline from gondola or caique?

  The talk puts Ratty—and the reader, too—into a dreaming state with its beauty, till at last the wayfarer leaves him with these words:

  And you, you will come, too, young brother; for the days pass, and never return, and the South still waits for you. Take the Adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes! ’Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new!… You can easily overtake me on the road, for you are young, and I am ageing and go softly. I will linger, and look back; and at last I will surely see you coming, eager and light-hearted, with all the South in your face!

  And with this the seafaring rat disappears down the road.

  Ratty stumbles home, still half hypnotized, and begins to pack his necessary belongings—moving, says Grahame, like a sleepwalker. This alarms his housemate, the Mole, who grapples with him, forcing him down, and the Rat at last lies trembling, exhausted, and begins to weep. Mole is anxious about him but leaves him alone, trying to bring life around him back to normal, and at last Ratty, still shaken but acknowledging to himself that his fit has passed, begins to sit up and join in. Grahame ends the chapter this way:

  Presently the tactful Mole slipped away and returned with a pencil and a few half-sheets of paper, which he placed on the table at his friend’s elbow.

  “It’s quite a long time since you did any poetry,” he remarked. “You might have a try at it this evening, instead of—well, brooding over things so much. I’ve an idea that you’ll feel a lot better when you’ve got something jotted down—if it’s only just the rhymes.”

  The Rat pushed the paper away from him wearily, but the discreet Mole took occasion to leave the room, and when he peeped in again some time later, the Rat was absorbed and deaf to the world; alternately scribbling and sucking the top of his pencil. It is true that he sucked a good deal more than he scribbled, but it was joy to the Mole to know that the cure had at least begun.

  The seafaring rat is a true pathfinder, in the terms described a few paragraphs back: He is a paver of the way who tries to open doors for Ratty, and to challenge the boundaries of his thinking. The fact that he is unsuccessful is not a measure of the beauty of his words or his way of telling what wonders might be Ratty’s for the asking.

  And yet, has he really been unsuccessful? We don’t know what Ratty is writing in the above chapter’s end, but we can guess. If I may be allowed to speak for us all, Ratty, who is a poet, has begun an epic about a rat who leaves home and everything familiar behind him for a life of marvelous, groundbreaking adventure. And the pleasure he gains from his writing is as real and as thrilling to his imagination as the thing itself would have been.

  My characters would have stayed behind, too, though only one was a poet. I admire pathfinders, but though I said at the beginning of this paper that my characters seem to seek out new paths, I think now that when all is said and done, they don’t, not really. Not like the seafaring rat of “Wayfarers All.” For my characters, each in his or her own story, one adventure will be enough to light up a whole life. Pathfinders will always be welcome in my house. But if they want to go to Borneo, they’ll have to go alone.

  Book signing, 1998

  “We humans, with our indomitable egos, are equipped with two qualities which … have served us well from the beginning and made survival if not possible, then certainly palatable: First, we are blessed with the ability to laugh, and second, we are storytellers.”

  New World, No World

  (2001)

  Some people think there’s a brave new world coming. I am not among them. I think it will only be the same old world wearing a different hat. For a while, anyway. Perhaps this is because I’m getting old, myself. For, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, when Miranda says, “O brave new World,/That has such people in’t,” her father, Prospero, doesn’t agree. He merely strokes his white beard and replies, “’Tis new to thee.”

  Of course, there are electronic developments coming along fast and furious these days, so that television, for instance, is getting better and better in the way it produces images. The newness won’t stop, I suppose, though I’m not sure you could call it brave. But what’s the use of it? The shows aren’t getting better and better. Now and then there is a terrific new one, but then it goes into reruns forever and ever. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, you know; better a rerun of a good show than a first run of a bad show. Still, it can get a little tiresome. Except when, once in a while, someone puts on a retrospective of a really old series like Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. The sound has no subtlety; the pictures are scratchy, black-and-white, far from easy on the eyes. They could use a few electronic developments. But oh, what wonderful shows they were, and still are, just as they stand!

  Movies aren’t getting any braver and newer, either, no matter how their screens expand or wrap around or cram themselves together fourteen at a time into one building. Movies are scrambling for new story ideas already, even before the future gets here, and seem forced to go in for remakes, old ideas in new hats. Once in a while something new and delicious does come along—Shrek, for instance, though I heard, without surprise, that William Steig has said he thinks it’s a funny movie but it’s not his story. Yes, Shrek is genuinely funny, and genuinely new—funny and new for almost all the right reasons—but it’s a huge exception. In a recent interview in the New York Times, revered New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael complained that a lot of movies nowadays are such immediate blockbusters at the box office that there’s no way for a critic to point out how bad they are. “If you say something negative about the big hits,” she said, “it’s like sour grapes. You can’t argue against them; they’re beyond criticism.”

  Email is certainly a brave new convenience, as long as it’s controlled—control may be a real factor for the future to deal with—but the letters themselves, written on a computer, aren’t any better than the letters that were written on typewriters, which in their turn weren’t any better than the letters written by hand, with pens. Words are words, however they’re rendered. I was in the main Providence post office the other day, and the stamp clerk told me there was an inside rumor going around that, in the near future, federal post offices would probably be delivering mail only three times a week, now that so many people use email. That was hard to imagine, and sad to imagine. Thank goodness they’ve apparently decided to let things stand. I’ve been waiting happily for the mail every day since 1937 when Sonja Henie, in response to the first and only fan letter I ever wrote, sent me an autographed picture. If you don’t know who Sonja Henie was, well, too bad for you. Anyway, the mail has magic for me. True, that letter with the check for five million dollars hasn’t appeared yet, but as long as there’s a mailman, there’s hope, isn’t there? Somehow, the news that you’ve become a multimillionaire would seem a lot less reliable if you got it on a computer screen than it would inside an envelope. But maybe that’s only my opinion. You who have grown up with computers probably wouldn’t agree.

  As for books, Roger Sutton said it all in his most recent elegant, well-reasoned, and gratifying Horn Book editorial. When a magazine reporter called him for his reaction to news that a publisher was planning to continue C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia with books commissioned from other writers, his first thought was to scorn anyone involved in such a project. But then, he says, “I stopped fretting about my display of critical invective and started instead to worry about what
this kind of cloning-by-corporation means for children’s books.” Talk about your reruns and remakes and sequels! There are a lot of timid souls these days in some of the publishing houses, if it’s possible to be, at one and the same time, timid and venal. They’re timid about taking chances on new writers with new ideas, because these might not make any money. Harry Potter has been a blessing for kids, but it’s been rather a disaster for the field in general. It demonstrates too graphically that there’s real money to be had out there, if only you can find the formula. But, well, I suppose that’s not so new a condition, either, when you come right down to it. Finding the formula is the same thing as striking oil, or hitting on the vein of gold. We like that kind of thing here in America. We like making money. Sudden, big money. It’s mainly why our ancestors came over here in the first place: riches, the land that contained them, and the freedom to go out and look for them. And there’s no reason to think the idea will lose its grip on us in the future.

  It’s true that a lot of things about the modern world are different from what they used to be, and these same things will be even more different fifty years from now, five hundred years from now. But allow me to stress that it’s things that are different. People aren’t any different, and it’s people who count, people who embody the real essence of life. We’re still made up of all the contradictory things that have always defined us, and we aren’t any better or any worse than we ever were. We just seem that way from time to time. And by “us” I mean children as well as adults. Are children any different from what they always were? Well, judge for yourselves. Here’s a quote I came across a few weeks ago in an airplane magazine: “Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.” The person who said this clearly thought children were worse than they used to be. But would you care to guess who said it, and when? Don’t bother; I’ll tell you. Socrates said it, and he said it sometime around 440 BC, in the neighborhood of two and a half thousand years ago. So if children aren’t any worse or any better than they always were, if people in general aren’t any worse or any better than they always were, what then? What is the meaning of a brave new world?

  Maybe this new frontier we’re told is coming isn’t going to be all that new. Maybe the changes are only going to be superficial. And yet, who can be sure? I wish I could be sure. But I’m no historian, no sociologist, not any kind of scientist, neither a seer nor a fortune-teller. And the funny thing is that as a person gets older, the future holds less and less interest. The introductory phrase “fifty years from now,” which had so much clout for my generation fifty years ago, now only brings on a shrug. We don’t care. We won’t be here. Except there are aspects of the time fifty years from now that we do care about. The environment, for instance. The education of our great-grandchildren. Little things like that.

  But aside from those few details, the only part of the future that interests me is so far in the future that it scarcely qualifies as something to care about, and yet it’s been hanging around in my mind since I first learned about the solar system. It’s been hanging around in my mind, and it’s been shaping the way I look at a great many things, not just the night sky. I always say, when asked where my ideas come from, that they seem to have come out of questions that have been with me since I was a preschooler, questions that don’t have any answers, or at least no easy ones. The one I’m referring to now has never turned up in one of my stories, but it’s only waiting its turn, and here it is: How can there be nothing out there on the other side of the universe?

  When I was in school, I read a lot of Greek and Roman myths, and I read them in a lot of different versions, starting with Hawthorne’s Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, and moving on from there to the livelier and more easily read versions in one volume of a set we had that has no name in my memory of it, and was simply called by my sister and me “the blue books.” I loved those stories, and read them over and over for years, the whole thing culminating with the publication in 1945 of Robert Graves’s Hercules, My Shipmate, which is a glorious retelling of the story of Jason and the Argonauts and the search for the golden fleece. Three years after its publication, I was studying Latin in my sophomore year of high school, where we were reading versions of the myths. Well, I was supposedly studying and reading Latin. I seem to recall that it was this very Latin teacher, a certain well-named Miss Stoner, who wrote for my midyear report, Her attitude somewhat lacks seriousness. However that may have been, I had already read Hercules, My Shipmate with immense enthusiasm when Miss Stoner held a copy up in front of our class and acknowledged its scholarship but warned us against its eroticism and told us not to read it. So I went back to the library, checked it out, and read it again.

  Now, I’m telling you all this about my relationship with the Greek myths in order to make sure you understand that it was not a scholarly relationship. The myths were great storytelling, is what. The names of their characters were preserved in the constellations, all heavily romantic. And they formed a screen between me and that unanswered question: How can there be nothing on the other side of the universe? Leaving Miss Stoner behind, I went on to college, where there was a science requirement. One of the options was a beginning course in astronomy. “Hey!” I said to myself. “The myths!” I entered the class, mooned about on top of the observatory drawing the constellations in the freezing New England dark, wrote a paper about Jason and Medea, and solidly flunked the midyear exam. An attitude that somewhat lacked seriousness was not an excuse for anything at college. It didn’t even provoke a comment from the dean. Sink or swim is the way it went at college. Well, finally I swam, sort of. I managed to pass the course with a C-minus in the spring. And then, whether because of me or not, but probably not—when you’re young, you think everything is because of you—the professor resigned her appointment and, so they say, left the college and went to Florida to become a hotel hostess. Life is sometimes every bit as interesting as a Greek myth.

  And all that time, the question hung suspended: How can there be nothing on the other side of the universe? What is the meaning of nothing? And if there’s really nothing, then what’s the meaning of anything? My sister, with far more of a scholarly mind than I could lay claim to, told me that in the process of attempting to confront the question herself, she found that all at once she was looking squarely at the outermost limit of her intelligence, the place where it ended, the wall beyond which she simply could not go. This is a good description of the situation. Here we are, considering what the future may be like, and while we consider, out there beyond our walls, beyond the city, beyond this continent, beyond all the world’s oceans and mountains, beyond Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper, beyond the sun itself, space goes on and on and on, dark and cold and blank except for the occasional star, without clocks or calendars, without air or water, even without an up or a down. So what do we make of that? What can we make of that, given the limits of human intelligence?

  Well, some human intelligences are less limited than others. The June 25 issue of Time magazine soberly announces, on its cover, a feature article about “How the Universe Will End” with this for a teaser: “Peering deep into space and time, scientists have just solved the biggest mystery in the cosmos.” The article is wonderful, fascinating, utterly humbling. It says that for a long time there have been two conflicting theories about how things will come to a finish: One is that the momentum caused by the big bang will turn around and bring everything hurtling back again into itself, causing what they call a big crunch, and the other is that the big-bang momentum will keep on sending things outward forever. Now scientists have proved to their satisfaction—please don’t ask me how—that the second theory is correct: The world will end as T. S. Eliot said it would, “not with a bang but a whimper.” “Earth should remain habitable for another few billion years,” says the article, and then, in what it calls a degenerate era, lasting trillions of years, planets, and here I more or less quote, will “detach from stars;
stars and planets evaporate from galaxies. Most of the ordinary matter in the universe [will be] locked up in degenerate stellar remnants—dead stars that have withered into white dwarfs or blown up and collapsed into neutron stars and black holes. Eventually, over spans of time greatly exceeding the current age of the universe, the protons themselves [will] decay.” After this comes a black-hole era lasting more trillions of years than I could grasp, and then—and then comes the dark era, in which there will be virtually nothing at all. “From here into the infinite future,” says the article, “the universe remains cold, dark and dismal.” And, it suggests, “that will be that—unless, of course, whatever inconceivable event that launched the original Big Bang should recur, and the ultimate free lunch is served once more.” This, however, would appear to be entirely unlikely, at least scientifically, although you could look at it biblically and draw the conclusion that, since we seem to be messing things up this time around, the way we did before the Flood, the gods are going to wipe the slate clean and have one more fresh try at the whole experiment.

  However that may be, consider the sentence “Earth should remain habitable for another few billion years.” Is it a relief to know that we don’t have to sell everything just yet and get out the cloaks and robes? It’s really too soon to go up to a mountaintop to wait for the end, the way some sects keep doing. And after all, why should we care anyway? We won’t be here. It will be as Prospero predicts in Shakespeare’s Tempest, when he says: