What Claudia teaches me about facts, mysteries and being changed
From the Mixed Up Files - E.E. Cummings, some info on how you can follow along on our trip to Italy & Spain
Hello Friends!
Welcome to the Just Beautiful Newsletter where you can expect a monthly essay about places where beauty and justice meet - lately, I’ve been spotting this in children’s literature. This essay is free, but paid subscribers also get a list of what I’m reading/watching/listening to, and other articles I’ve found that highlight the intersection of beauty & justice. If you are not a paid subscriber- this is the month to do it! I will be sharing a 4-part series about my family’s travels to Rome & Madrid - chock full of what we did, how we did it (and what we read!) 😉 I hope you can join me for the month - feel free to cancel afterwards to drop back to a free subscription. Your support will be buying us churros and hot chocolate, for which we are deeply grateful.
In the mean time - I’ve been pondering how to help my kids appreciate all of the beauty and art and amazing history we will see when we travel, and as a result, we just finished reading From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler aloud as a family…
“But Mrs Frankweiler, you should want to learn one new thing every day!”(says Claudia)
“… No … I don’t agree with that. I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but you can never really feel anything with them. It’s hollow.”
-- From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankwieler
The premise of this story is that Claudia decides to run away from home to the New York Metropolitan museum of art with one of her younger brothers. On the surface it’s a classic “run away adventure” story. But as I read (perhaps because I’ve been thinking about education so much lately), I felt like it was sharing something valuable about how we learn and change.
From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler takes place at a museum, an institute for preserving the past. By contrast, the main character, Claudia, is presented as a very modern girl. She loves order, cleanliness, and a plan. In the 90’s we would have called her Type A. Today we’d say she’s a Highly Sensitive Child. (Case in point: she can’t handle walking too far in the winter because she can’t handle feeling cold and yet sweaty in her winter coat at the same time. Claudia! I understand this completely). She also doesn’t have any major problems at home. She’s not an orphan in a 19th century novel trying to escape from an evil aunt. She’s not fleeing the coal mines, or trying to survive a long winter on the praries of Wisconsin. This is 1967. She has two stable parents and a house in the suburbs.
And yet.
This is the life she wants to run away from. She tells herself she is running away because of “injustice”, but she’s a bit vague about what that injustice is (she even admits this to herself, but I suppose she has read enough books to understand that running away from home is a big enough deal it needs a reason of some kind, and “boredom” doesn’t really cut it).
In 1967, Claudia’s world is not shaped draconian child protection laws or smartphones (the two big reasons the internet claims children today are both bored and anxious). Although Claudia can’t really articulate it when she first plans her run-away, but what she wants is to be changed. To be different inside.
But, equipped with the tools of her late 1960’s modern world and her type-A personality, and her certainty in the importance of facts, even the adventure of sleeping in an antique bed and bathing in a restaurant fountain at a museum are not enough to change her.
In the end, the children meet the eccentric character Mrs. Frankweiler. (Plot spoilers are unavoidable, but I’ll be as vague as possible). Mrs. Frankweiler points out Claudia’s original running away plan didn’t work: “You found that running away from home didn’t make a real difference?” she says. “You were still the same Greenwich Claudia, planning and washing and keeping things in order?”
Mrs. Frankweiler helps Claudia recognise that the antidote to her discontent and longing for change is not another list, and not learning one new fact every day. The antidote is found in sitting with what she knows for a while. In mystery. Wonder. Love.
It’s found in falling in love with the beauty of an angel statue. It’s in caring about the statue so much that she feels she “belongs” to it. It is the keeping of a really powerful secret, tucked deep inside. That’s what changes her.
Mrs. Frankweiler - although she is a fellow Type-A list-maker and cataloguer - teaches Claudia that the lists of new facts are not what’s most important. “(When) you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but you can never really feel anything with them. It’s hollow.”
It’s feeling the new things you’ve learned, letting them swell up inside that changes you.
When I read this, I pictured a person rattling with facts, like one of C.S. Lewis’s “Men without Chests” that he describes when he is talking about modern education1 (he’s writing about 20 years before the Mixed Up Files, but, same idea). A bubble-head full of rattling facts is not a good outcome of an education, nor a life I want.
And yet, I love learning a new thing. I read piles of books and articles every month because I love it. I am quite happy to leave a bar of chocolate in my cupboard and just have one square every night after tea, but I cannot leave a half-read book on my nightstand. I need to devour the whole thing.
And so reading aloud to my children is both a discipline, and a blessing. It forces me to pay attention to every line. To re-read, and read again. To take a breath between new ideas. To let them fill me up inside and touch every corner.
Although our trip overseas will be a whirlwind adventure, where we will be packing in new facts and experiences every day, my hope is that somewhere in there, there will be something that touches us. Something that we can fall in love with. And that even when the trip is done, we can let those experiences sit with us, until we can feel them touching every corner.
What are some things that you do to cultivate this sort of deep appreciation for words, beauty, or ideas? For me — bookclub! As soon as I’m talking about what I have read with another person, I’m digesting it, rather than inhaling it.
This newsletter is also a very special place for me to do this, too. I am certain I would not have thought as much about Mrs. Frankwieler if not for the discipline of writing this essay. So thank you, friends, for making this a space of forced contemplation! :)
Share your ideas with me in the comments! Comments are open to everyone, not just paid subscribers.
Just Beautiful Links:
Thanks to our paid subscribers, this month the “just beautiful links” are open to everyone to enjoy!
🌸🌹🌺 If you need a good poem about mystery and wonder and seeing the familiar like it is something new to be discovered (vs FACTS and information and acting like you already know everything) — this is a big theme in the poetry of e e cummings. And guess what? Cummings is obsessed with SPRING. So it’s perfect reading for this time of year. May I suggest Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond ? There is a reason people get tattoos of the last line. Or Spring is like a perhaps hand? Here is a whole article picking out the Springiest lines. Or THIS ONE that has the phrase “Mud-lucious puddle wonderful” in it! Or this one, about the greenly leaping spirits of trees, which I would recite on my friend’s birthdays…. It’s SPRING!
📺 Why is there no good TV after Ted Lasso? We need a show rec, and not an Apple TV one, please! Our kids have enjoyed this Disney+ Lost Cities TV series — anything with archeology is cool at the moment. I think we’re basically just waiting to get Netflix again and I’m going to find a good K-drama.
📚 We read The Wild Robot Escapes which was the next installment in the Wild Robot series. I don’t think my boys (age 5&7)enjoyed it as much, because the whole book felt a bit perilous. Somehow the Wild Robot surviving on the island was adventurous but not too perlious (until the RECO robots show up at the end!), but this book made them nervous the whole way through, although they liked the characters and really wanted me to read it. We’ve now started on The Wild Robot Protects, which they are enjoying more. We finished the Chronicles of Narnia series for the second time this year. We laughed our way through Julia Donaldson’s collection of poetry to be performed aloud (Instructions for Giants is a favorite!) And now that it is spring, we’re reading a page of Slow Down every morning at breakfast and trying to notice all the Spring changes, along with our Sing a Song of Seasons: A Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year book. I want them to try The Green Ember, but it still might be too intense. We’ve only read two chapters, but it was vetoed in favor of Anne of Green Gables ( I’m never going to complain about reading Anne of Green Gables to my kids!)
📚 Grown-up reads this month: I finished The Lazy Genius Way by Kendra Adachi. The subtitle is: “Embrace what matters, ditch what doesn’t, and get stuff done.” I think I naturally lean this way anyway 😅 so it was nice to confirm my own biases. BUT I love Kendra’s podcast and articles, and something she does super well in the book is help flesh out what this can look like practically in different areas of life. (Like, what does it actually look like to “lazy genius” your morning routine? How do you not fall into being hyper rigid and perfectionistic OR givng up completely and doing nothing?) Ghosted by Nancy French. Ooof, this one was pretty heavy, but so gripping. She is a great “suck you straight in” kind of writer. This is a memoir from a ghost-writer for American politically conservative politicians and celebrities. It’s about her upbringing, and how her life changed when she started doing investigative journalism into abuse at an evangelical church camp, coinciding with the Republican shift towards Trump. Our kids were at their grandparents and I didn’t get out of bed until 10am because I had to see how it would finish. Dear Henry, Love Edith by Becca Kinzer. You need a fun read after something heavy. I saw it won an award in a fiction category recently. I liked the premise (two people who both think the other one is super old and write letters to them like they are their grandparents, yet they are both in their 30s). But it was less epistolary than I expected. I liked that the main character goes to South Africa (there’s a real nonprofit the writer mentions at the end of her book, and it’s a “I know people who know all those people” situation). Although. The writer should come to the Wild Coast for herself and her writing would be a tiny bit more accurate. 😉 But a quick, breezy read. Also read The Mis-Arrangement of Sana Saeed by Noreen Mughees after reading an interview with the Author about how this was a modern Persuasion retelling.
(Why am I reading this year-old interview? Well, it was a deep dive after someone recommended this unpacking of what’s going on with book/movie It Ends With Us which I had mixed feelings about).
Via Priya Parker, here is a list of 50 questions to ask the next time the conversation turns to politics - especially when you are in a conversation with someone who supports a different political candidate than you do.
— Thanks for reading, friends! And be sure to share what you’re reading in the comments (or chime in on what you do to help you “fill up” with the new things you learn.
He says “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst...”… “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
I love this children’s book (The Mixed Up Files..) so much! I don’t know how many times I read it as a girl (lol but also YES to the description of Claudia as a HSP).
Now with all these little boys of mine I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought of the scene where Jamie has to keep his winter coat zipped to muffle the jangling change, but it’s okay because little boys “like sweat and complications.” This is absolutely, unequivocally true 😂.
I introduced my children to the book this year, and they did the customary whining about how they weren’t going to like it, but then listened several times through on audio, quoting lines back to me and laughing uproariously. There are certain authors, Beverly Cleary’s “Ramona” series come to mind, that delight me with how well they observe and reflect the actual quirks and charms of children — when you get the sense in a narrative that the child characters are allowed to be “born persons”. I think it’s good for our children to see themselves in these books, but maybe it’s even better for parents to be reminded that our kids have their own narratives too.
That was one of my favorite books as a child, too. Another was My Side of the Mountain. And of course, the Chronicles of Narnia series.
I guess I loved the thought of children facing difficult challenges on their own, with minimal interference from adults because I always felt like I could and should be doing something more than just going to school and playing.