🇺🇸▼
Albert Einstein once gave advice to a mother who hoped her son would become a scientist. He told her, "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales." He added, "If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales." This famous advice suggests that the deepest measure of intelligence is a kind of flexibility in how we exist. It is the ability to move through uncertainty with grace and confidence. Since uncertainty is the very pulse that beats inside our lives, fairy tales are not just stories for children. As J.R.R. Tolkien passionately insisted, these stories are more than simple fantasy or fiction. They shimmer with a surreal quality so intense that they become a mirror for what is most real within us. They reveal truths that we often do not yet see.
Fairy tales are above all in service of life’s most difficult, most unfinishable task — knowing who we are and what we want. Their most revelatory function is to remind us that, because we know ourselves only incompletely, we don’t always know what we are looking for until we find it, often by way of getting lost, or until it finds us, often in a guise we don’t immediately recognize as the very thing we long for.
We are enchanted by their strangeness because we are largely strangers to ourselves. We feel ambivalent about our desire for transformation, redemption, and a return home. We are restless in our longing to uncover the face of love and to reveal the hand of mercy. These stories ask us to believe in magic and reward our trust with profound truth. Above all, fairy tales serve life's most difficult and unfinishable task: knowing who we are and what we truly want. Their most powerful function is to remind us that we know ourselves only incompletely. Therefore, we do not always know what we are looking for until we find it. This discovery often happens by way of getting lost. It may occur until it finds us in a shape we do not immediately recognize as the very thing we long for.
The Italian writer Cristina Campo explored this profound paradox in her excellent posthumous essay collection, The Unforgivable: And Other Writings. Campo was born on April 29, 1923, and passed away on January 10, 1977. She observed that many fairy tales "end like a ring right where they began." In these stories, there are no straight roads. You start out walking as if in a straight line, and eventually, that line reveals itself to be a labyrinth, a perfect circle, a spiral, or even a star. It might even be a motionless point the soul never leaves, even as the body and mind take what appears to be an arduous journey. You seldom know where you are traveling, or even what you are traveling toward, for you cannot know, in reality, what the water ballerina, the singing apple, or the fortune-telling bird may be. You cannot know the word to conjure with: the abstract, culminating word that is stronger than any certainty.
Through these routeless convolutions, we map the unknown territory of our own interior worlds. Campo considers the paradox of self-discovery in a passage evocative of the Chinese notion of wu-wei, which means "trying not to try." She asks how we can recognize the means to reach a goal if the thing we start out looking for cannot and must not have a face. How can the destination ever be anything but an apparent destination? No one arrives at the enlightenment he sets out to seek. It will come to him in its own sweet time. Thus, the destination walks side by side with the traveler, or it hovers behind him. In truth, the traveler has always had it within him and is only moving toward the motionless center of his life. This is the antrum near the spring, the cave, where childhood and death, in one another's arms, confide the secret they share. The idea of travel, effort, and patience is paradoxical, yes, but it is also exact. For in this paradox, we stumble on the intersection of eternity and time.
Through these routeless convolutions, we map the terra incognita of your own interior world. In a passage evocative of the Chinese notion of wu-wei — “trying not to try” — Campo considers the paradox of self-discovery:
It is hardly surprising that, in their central project of loosening the clutch of certainties we call a self, fairy tales blur the ordinary experience of time. Time, after all, is the substance we are made of. In a passage brimming with the musicality that Maurice Sendak considered the key to great storytelling, Campo—herself the daughter of a musician and a composer—writes about this suspension. She describes how the geometry of time and space is abolished as if by magic.
You might walk for hours in a circle, or conversely, you might reach the edge of the infinite in a few quick steps. It is not our state of heightened vigilance that casts a spell on the world around us. It is a much more recondite correspondence between discovering and letting ourselves be discovered. It is the correspondence between giving shape and taking shape. At such moments, everything already was, yet truly is. In that state, any peasant, pointing in any direction, will sound like a gnome or a fairy, will gesture at the path you nearly took a thousand times without suspecting it. The path might lead to four indescribably white springs suspended on the hillside, protected, for a hundred paces or a thousand miles, by fields of tall fragrant grasses. Or it might lead to the royal tomb hidden by the Etruscans in a cave now covered with brambles. From this place, white hounds and a man the size of an ifrit, carrying a shotgun, emerge. Or the path leads down below the ridge, secretly lighted by the sun, at a bend in the riverbank so deep it casts the whole hanging tangle of pink roots into shadow. There is velvet water that looks motionless and yet moves. Water that runs off into the beyond without flowing, so that it would be enough just to follow it. That beyond, which is always forbidden and always intimated in our dreams, is transpiring here and now.
In a passage brimming with the musicality Maurice Sendak considered the key to great storytelling, Campo — the daughter of a musician and a composer — writes:
I am thinking now of Hannah Arendt's magnificent meditation on love. She wrote, "Fearlessness is what love seeks." Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future. Hence, the only valid tense is the present, the Now. Perhaps this is why love is the central axis of most fairy tales. Perhaps it is why love in real life has a certain dreamlike quality. Both love and dreams are ways of getting to know the stranger in us. As Carl Jung wrote, "In each of us there is another whom we do not know." This inner other speaks to us in dreams.
There is the same dreamlike quality and the same capacity for revelation in the state we enter once a fairy tale ejects us from time and thrusts us into nowness. Campo paints the dreamscape we enter with vivid imagery. Quick glances direct our steps, and hands point beyond the thresholds. Behind windowpanes so clear they blind us move the figures of the ones we loved, the ones we've lost.
There is the same dreamlike quality and the same capacity for revelation in the state we enter once a fairy tale ejects us from time and thrusts into nowness. Campo paints the dreamscape we enter:
Behold, they stand up from the piano bench or arrange fruit on a table. It all unfolds like a scroll from a mouth known yet unknown, a dark and luminous sentence, an irrefutable commentary set down between past and future. In being both a portal between the known and the unknown and a still point between past and future, fairy tales help us discern our own nature. They guide us toward the deepest truths of who we are and help us apply them to the mystery of being alive. This is a nonlinear process, the fruits of which we call maturity.
Campo writes that maturity is not the result of persuasion, much less an intellectual epiphany. It is a sudden, she would almost say biological, collapse. It is a point that must be reached by all the senses at once if truth is going to be turned into nature. This collapse is not a failure but a transformation. It is the moment when the abstract becomes the concrete, when the story becomes the living reality. Through this lens, the journey of the fairy tale becomes the journey of the human soul. We do not simply learn a lesson; we undergo a fundamental shift in our being. We learn that the path we walked was the destination all along. We realize that the magic was not in the spells, but in the way we learned to see the world again. The stranger we feared was simply the part of ourselves we had not yet embraced. The unknown territory we mapped was our own heart. And the time we thought we were losing was the time we were finally gaining.
The stories of fairy tales are not escapes from reality, but deeper entries into it. They strip away the superficial layers of our lives to reveal the core. They teach us that certainty is an illusion and that uncertainty is the only true home. They remind us that we are always in motion, yet always at rest. We are constantly becoming, yet always were. This paradox is the heart of the fairy tale, and it is the heart of the mature life. To know who we are and what we want is to accept this paradox. It is to walk the labyrinth with courage. It is to trust the spiral. It is to believe in the magic that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. As we read these stories, we are not just listening to a tale. We are listening to the voice of our own souls, waiting to be recognized. We are waiting to find the water ballerina, the singing apple, and the word that makes all the difference. We are waiting to arrive at the point where the journey ends and the living begins.
The wisdom of Cristina Campo and the enduring power of fairy tales offer a guide for this essential work. They show us that the path is not a line to be walked quickly, but a circle to be understood slowly. They remind us that the destination is not a place we reach, but a state we become. And they invite us to embrace the mystery of our own nature. In doing so, we find that the greatest intelligence is not the ability to solve problems, but the ability to live with them. It is the ability to hold uncertainty without fear. It is the ability to trust the unknown. And it is the ability to love the stranger within. This is the true meaning of maturity, the true power of fairy tales, and the true path to knowing who we are and what we want.