Barking with the Big Dogs

by Natalie Babbitt

  The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind.

  But even if we don’t care, since this future I’ve been talking about is such a long way off, even so, all this new information will still hang around in the backs of our minds. How will we deal with the concept of an approaching degenerate era, followed by a black-hole era, and then followed by nothing at all, a great big zero?

  Well, what I think is that we will deal with it the way we’ve always dealt with it. The concept of an end to the world is not, after all, a new concept. It wasn’t even new in Shakespeare’s day. It is tied inescapably to the concept of our own deaths, and so goes back to the very beginning. Likewise, the concept of there being nothing on the other side of the universe isn’t new, either, whether the intelligence of most of us can grasp it or not. I think it will go right on being impossible to look out at the night sky and not wonder what’s out there beyond the Milky Way, as long as there’s a Milky Way to wonder about. For some of the more adventuresome of us, it’s impossible not to push the science as far as it will go so that we can look, either through an immense telescope or through the window of a spaceship. We want to know, we’re scared to know, we peek and shiver, and we even laugh. Remember that lovely story about President Reagan, in a cabinet meeting, suggesting an exploratory trip to the sun? “But, Mr. President,” protests a secretary, “we can’t do that! It would be far too hot.” The president pauses, thinks this over, and finally says triumphantly, “Well, then, we’ll go at night!”

  As I’ve already said, the question “What is the meaning of nothing?” is logically followed by another question: “If there’s nothing, then what is the meaning of anything?” But this, too, is a very old question which we have always answered by ignoring its implications and continuing to assign meaning to whatever we choose, thereafter fighting to the death anyone who has assigned meaning to something else. Or if not fighting, then at least clinging comfortably to routine. Someone is supposed to have asked Saint Francis of Assisi once what he would do if he knew the world was coming to an end, and he is supposed to have answered that he’d go right on hoeing his garden. So maybe we’re all crazy. I don’t know. But we have our good points. It seems to me that, random though our development may have been, however poorly we may run our various societies, however cruel and self-serving and greedy we may be, and however disinterested nature may be in our welfare, we humans, with our indomitable egos, are equipped with two qualities which will serve us well as things progress, 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.

  There’s no way to know for certain what the stories we tell will be like as the future hurries by, but stories will happen. They always have. We will be telling them until close to the end of those few billion years that the Earth has left. They will be the same stories we’ve always told: stories about our world, our fears, our dreams, the things that make us laugh. They will be stories that will give us ways to imagine, understand, and deal with all the mysteries of our lives, from thunderstorms to black holes in the universe, just as they’ve always done. And when those few billion years are all used up, well, who cares what happens then? There won’t be anybody left to wonder.

  I don’t think it matters much how these future stories will be told. Probably they will be like the letters I mentioned in the beginning: just the same whether sent by email, or typed, or written out longhand with a pen. Or performed by an elder sitting near the campfire. Or scratched wordless onto the walls of a cave. Maybe what we know physically as books won’t survive, but so what? The important thing is that the stories keep coming, not what form they will take. One thing is for sure: The changes will be taken for granted by the children of their times. What child today is astonished by computers? My generation may be astonished, but they’re not. When they are grown, there will be changes that astonish them, but their children won’t turn a hair. And so it will go. Each new batch of changes will seem completely everyday and natural to each new batch of children. The important thing is the stories themselves and the unchanging human nature they serve. A woman named Irene Peter, about whom I know absolutely nothing, is reported to have said, and I quote, “Just because everything is different doesn’t mean anything has changed.”

  So we’ll go right on, regardless, doing what we need to do to make life seem worthwhile, and I’m not going to worry about it. I dislike change; however, I never was able to stop it from coming into my life, and won’t ever be able to stop it. But I am temporary. So are we all. The best thing to do is to look at the night sky once in a while and remember that everything is temporary. And then go right on dealing with the human things we all have to deal with. Some of these things can give us immense pleasure and satisfaction, and the comfort of knowing there are things that matter, things that have meaning for us and will go right on having meaning through every one of those few billion years life has remaining. Children, for instance. And stories. There are a few things, thank goodness, that won’t change at all.

  The author’s painting of the man in the yellow suit, for the cover of the Horn Book Magazine

  “The fundamental reason why Alice in Wonderland was my favorite book was that it confirmed my long-held suspicion—long held even by fourth grade—that grown-ups, and the world they have created, are mad.”

  We’re All Mad Here

  (2004)

  Children often ask me to name the book that was my favorite when I was their age, and I always tell them it was Alice in Wonderland. The real title is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, of course, but nobody calls it that. I don’t know why, except that it takes longer to say, but I guess it doesn’t really matter. In any case, when I tell children about Alice, I don’t go into all the reasons why it was my favorite. I do say the pictures were important. It was the pictures that made me decide to become a children’s book illustrator when I grew up. I made this decision when I was in the fourth grade, and I never really changed my mind. But there was more to it than the pictures, and that’s what I want to talk about tonight. After all, it’s spring at last, and what better time to go out on a limb?

  The fundamental reason why Alice in Wonderland was my favorite book was that it confirmed my long-held suspicion—long held even by fourth grade—that grown-ups, and the world they have created, are mad. For the most part, they operate on systems that have no basis in rationality. Children are rational, but their elders are not, and can’t explain anything. (As in the question “Why do I have to do that?” to which the answer is “Because I said so.”) Is it possible to reason irrationally? Certainly. The grown-up characters in Alice reason irrationally at a great rate all through the book. There is only one rational character in the Alice stories, and that character is Alice herself.

  I became aware of the madness of adults, and puzzled over it, long before I was familiar with Alice. It began when I was a preschooler. In order to demonstrate that, I will have to tell you four brief stories. For those who’ve heard all my stories before, and there’ll be a few of you, I recommend an alphabet game that I often play when there’s time to pass. Starting with A, try to think of one foreign and four American major cities for each of the twenty-six letters. No fair using some dinky town nobody else has ever heard of. And I promise you I’ll be finished with these stories long before you’ve fought your way through to M, let alone Z. All right. Back to the fact of the madness of adults.

  To the best of my recollection, my awareness of irrationality began when I was four. It began small, but it began memorably. My sister, who is two years older than I am, was at school, and I was alone in the kitchen, sitting on some kind of a high chair, where I’d been told firmly by my mother to stay until I fi
nished my lunch. I’d been there for quite a while, because there were canned pears for dessert, and I was putting off the necessity of dealing with them. I didn’t like canned pears. Still don’t. Canned pears, unlike fresh ones, have strings in them. My mother knew I didn’t like them, but served them to me anyway. Her plea, in such situations, was that I think of the starving Armenians. But since I didn’t know who the Armenians were, or why they were starving, my patience was short. On this particular day, it finally ran out. I climbed down from my high chair and threw my pears in the sink. And then I went down the hall toward the front door, passing my mother, who was headed in the other direction. I was stopped with my hand on the doorknob by my mother’s voice from the kitchen. She called to me and said, “Whose pears are these in the sink?”

  Now, at the age of four, I was probably not familiar with the word irrational. Nevertheless, I clearly recall being puzzled by this question from my mother. At that particular moment, she and I were the only ones in the house, with the exception of our bulldog, Big Mike. But Big Mike had a weak stomach and was therefore never given pears to eat, canned or otherwise, and even if he had, it’s unlikely he’d have thrown them in the sink. And of course my mother knew she hadn’t done it. So when she asked whose pears they were, I decided to answer in the same vein, singsonging back from the front door, “I don’t know!” And got spanked for it. Well, I’m not sure if I got spanked for saying “I don’t know” or if it was because I threw my pears in the sink in spite of the starving Armenians. But that’s not the point. The point is, why did my mother ask such an irrational question?

  Then there was the time when Mildred, a friend who lived next door, stole some doll underwear from my sister when the three of us were playing outside. My sister and I both saw her do it. We ran into our house and complained loudly to our mother. But she, feisty as she was about most things, only said in this case that heaven will punish sinners. You know how it goes—and I quote: “Leave her to heaven.” For the next few days, full of expectation, I watched the house next door, but nothing at all happened. At last I decided that if heaven didn’t care what Mildred did, it wouldn’t care what I did, either. So, while my sister was at school, I took out her brand-new scooter—which I had expressly been told not to touch—and rode it off down the sidewalk. But I hit a bump, fell over, and bloodied my nose. For a very long time after this, I believed that heaven had put that bump there to punish me. But why punish me and not Mildred? I was just as good as Mildred. Maybe even better. I couldn’t make it out.

  Two years later, after a move to another town, my sister and I were walking home from the public swimming pool that was only a park away from our house. It was the middle of summer. And all at once, out of the blue, my sister informed me that there wasn’t any Santa Claus. At first I thought she was pulling my leg, but it soon became apparent that she was telling the truth. I don’t remember whether she and I discussed the situation. What I decidedly do remember is being, first, angry about the deception, and then mystified. It was grown-ups who had made the whole thing up, that much was clear, but why? Yes, the Santa Claus story was jolly, but that wouldn’t have served as an excuse for any lie I might have told. I don’t remember ever asking my mother for an explanation. Perhaps I thought she would explain it with a reason that would once again leave me hanging.

  One final example. In those days, when I was six or seven, my sister and I were each given ten pennies every week to put into the collection plate at Sunday school. But, having been cautioned, in a general way, to look out for the cost of things in everyday life, the cost as compared to the value, and not to waste money—we were not a wealthy family, and it was, after all, the Depression—I looked over the cost and the value of Sunday school and decided it wasn’t worth ten pennies. So week after week I only put five into the collection plate, and kept the other five in my Sunday pocketbook. After a while, my pocketbook got a little heavy, and my mother opened it to see why. She was horrified. Another spanking for me. And another mystification: When does a caution apply? When was I supposed to make up my own mind about the value of something, and when was I supposed to measure by someone else’s yardstick? But I don’t think I ever asked about this. I seem only to have stored it away to wonder about. I am still wondering.

  These are only four examples, but they’ll do. I spent the next few years growing up without changing much, still observing irrationalities, still always asking “Why?” and still getting not much in the form of an answer. But at the same time I too was becoming irrational. Married, finally, and a mother myself, I too lied to my children about Santa Claus. I too said things like “Whose pears are these in the sink?” which often took a form just as familiar: You look at your child, who is scribbling on the wall, and you say, “What are you doing?”

  To top it all off, when my children asked why, about this situation or that, I seem to have chosen to answer, “Because that’s the way things are.” This isn’t much better than saying, “Because I said so,” but it’s a little better. It tells more of the truth. It just stops too soon. If said correctly, it would be: “That’s the way things are, because all of us grown-ups are mad, and you are in training.”

  I grew up, as most of us do, surrounded by a lot of rules. They were all pretty basic, regulating behavior in private as well as public. Rules weren’t laws, exactly. The government wasn’t telling you not to kick your sister. But as soon as you were old enough to draw the attention of the government, it told you plenty. I observed all these rules and laws to the letter, because I didn’t like to lose the approval of my mother or the police department. I didn’t want to get spanked or go to jail. I became, at last, what you see before you: the kind of grown-up who always stops at stop signs, and who never goes through the ten-item line at the grocery with more than ten items. I had learned to accept the premise that it isn’t up to me, an average citizen, to obey only the convenient laws put forward by the government. Laws are there to be obeyed, whether they’re convenient or not. If the government finds out that you’ve thrown your pears in the sink, you’re going to have to answer for it. A great many people throw their pears in the sink anyway, believing that the government won’t ever find out, and most of the time they’re right. In Providence, where I live now, someone has pointed out that red lights and stop signs aren’t laws at all to Rhode Islanders, but only suggestions. You have to wonder how things hold together. Somehow they do hold together. It’s just that there’s no rational reason for it.

  Long before Rhode Island, though, as I was growing up in Ohio, I was becoming aware that parents and governments can make as many rules and laws as they want to, but none of it will make a particle of difference to the natural world.

  Moving from southwestern Ohio up to a suburb of Cleveland on the shores of Lake Erie was the event that began my education in this aspect. I was eleven years old. People who’ve never lived near the Great Lakes have never seen what is known in weather circles as “the lake effect.” Great Lakes storms in all seasons are dramatic, violent, and beautiful. They also come along whenever they feel like it, and don’t give the least kind of a damn about humanity. All parts of nature are pretty much like that. Remember the lyrics to “Ol’ Man River,” which ask, and please forgive my paraphrasing: What does the Mississippi care if the world’s got troubles?

  So here, on the one hand, were the lessons I was getting about how human beings, especially mothers, Sunday school teachers, and policemen, are in control of just about everything, and yet there, on the other hand, were lessons showing that human beings, whatever their professions, were in control of almost nothing. There was and is no rational way to put these two things together. Nevertheless, put them together we must.

  And of course, World War II was getting under way for America along about then. Europe was a complete mess, and Asia wasn’t much good, either. So here we were praising the Lord and passing the ammunition, as the popular song had it, and starting out to save the world, which meant having to end the wor
ld for huge numbers of Europeans and Asians, soldiers and civilians both. There’s no other way to fight a war. We did what we had to do. But none of it sat very well with what I heard in church. I was in real church by that time, not Sunday school, and I was observing that religion lives uneasily with war, in spite of what we’d been taught about the Crusades, and in spite of hymns like “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” A great deal of irrational reasoning is required. And yet, and yet, the sun came up every morning, and lake-effect storms swept across northern Ohio in every season, just the same as always. Everything was utterly different, and everything was exactly the same, and there’s nothing rational about that.

  What it all seems to come down to is that we humans have a very slim grip on the definition of what’s rational. The societies we have created, here and everywhere else around the world, are messy, unjust, and dangerous. But each society believes those adjectives are descriptive only of all the other societies, while it itself is fair, tidy, and safe. We’d get along with each other a lot better if we could admit that we are all pretty much alike regardless of what society we belong to, but that seems to go against the grain.

  Well, but when you remember how young this planet is, compared to much of the universe, what else can we expect of ourselves? A while ago, someone said that if you laid out the age of the Earth as a vertical as tall as the Empire State Building, you could place a thin dime on the very topmost part and that would be the total age of humanity. We haven’t been around very long. A moment ago we were cavemen, and a moment before that we were apes. At least, if you believe in evolution, that’s what we were. So if we’ve still got a lot of ape in us, where’s the surprise? We are deeply and anxiously self-congratulatory and egotistical, but maybe we have to be in order to believe we’re in control. We do, after all, have to believe we’re in control, and that means inventing all sorts of reasonable reasons for our irrational behavior, which we spell out for each other gravely every chance we get. There is a lot of gravity during an election year, isn’t there? A great deal of reasoning—just as there is in Alice in Wonderland. Do you remember the story told by the Dormouse at the mad tea party? Allow me, with a few cuts here and there, to refresh your memories, first reminding you, in case you’ve forgotten, that treacle, referred to here, is a blend of molasses, sugar, and corn syrup: