True North

 

One thing have I asked of the LORD,

that will I seek after:

that I may... gaze upon the beauty of the LORD

 

“There’s something about north, something that sets it apart from all other directions” (E.B. White).

 

I’ve always loved E.B. White’s children’s stories and Stuart Little (not to be confused with Chicken Little) is my favorite. (Charlotte’s Web is another.)

Stuart Little, as you probably know,  was a mouse. Well, sort of. White never said he was a mouse, but only that he “looked very much like a mouse in every way.” I believe Stuart Little is Everyman.

 

I thought of Stuart again a few days ago when I read a review of the book in The Wall Street Journal. The reviewer wrote, “When I first read E.B. White’s, 'Stuart Little' as a child, the ending disturbed me. The title character has left his New York City home in search of a bird, Margalo, whom he loves dearly. Does Stuart find her? We never find out. All we learn is that ‘he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.’” 

 

The reviewer was disappointed that the story had no conclusion, but White himself explained in an essay in the New York Times that being “headed in the right direction," is the conclusion. When asked to clarify, he stated that "He was searching for beauty." 

 

I believe the book is what some would call a muthos, a myth that enshrines truth, goodness and beauty, an example of the only literature Plato permitted children in his republic to read. Having seen “truth” in myth, he reasoned, they would recognize it later on. (That was C.S. Lewis’ rationale for writing the Narnia Tales: He hoped that children, as they read the myths, would come to love Aslan and so would love Jesus when they encountered him.)

 

At one point in Stuart’s journey he meets a repairman who muses: “There’s something about north, something that sets it apart from all other directions. A person who is heading north is not making any mistake, in my opinion.” “That’s the way I look at it,” said Stuart. “I rather expect that from now on I shall be traveling north until the end of my days.” “Worse things than that could happen to a person,” said the repairman.

 

There’s something about north, something that sets it apart from all other directions. For George MacDonald it is a beautiful place “at the back of the North Wind,” where there is no sorrow or loss, where “everyone is happy and looks like they will be even happier tomorrow.” North is the invisible realm of reality, above and beyond us, "where Christ is" (Colossians 3:1). 

Stuart, like the rest of us, was traveling north to find beauty, that for which his heart ached. Those who seek will find it, or better yet, they will find a man—Jesus. “No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it,” C.S. Lewis wrote. "Those who seek find” (The Great Divorce).

If you’re traveling north this year, you’re not making a mistake. Worse things than that could happen to a person.

David Roper

1.5.21