I was reading a short children's novel today because this winter I am helping to direct a play which is based on the book. I haven't read a fiction novel for many years. Instead, I read a lot of articles on the internet about the latest scientific discoveries, and news from various parts of the world. The last novel I read a few years ago, to reminisce about my childhood, was EB White's trumpeter of the Swan... before that, the last one would have been Peter Pan in 1992. I was a voracious reader as a child, and my mother was very curious about why I didn't want to read when I became an adult and left the nest. I told her I wanted to just live life, and not read about it. In recent years, my reason would have been slightly different, but similar - I wanted to look at the world, and learn about it - not look through the funhouse mirror/lens of someone else's perspective on the world.

I was pleasantly surprised though, with how much I learned from reading this very simple story. It's called "the best christmas pageant ever" by Barbara Robinson. It's a very trite and simplistic story based around a traditional event which happens in churches all across the country on christmas night. The author is clearly a very face-value kind of person, and she writes from within that sort of perspective about the world. The fact that she used such a stock narrative, and a stock set of characters (some children who interact with eachother both at school and at church) gave me a lot of insight into this mindset that is so foreign to me - that of the person who just sees the world as being a self evident place.

Particularly fascinating, was a character where the author was able to show her own feelings towards the smarty pants kid in class. This rift I have written about between reasoners, and face-value people happens early - even in elementary school. In this story, there is a character named Alice who is misconstrued as being arrogant. And she becomes the one character in the book who the whole school makes fun of. No one else suffers that level of unanimous reaction from the kids on the playground.

I was volunteering at a school a couple of years ago... and it was so interesting to encounter this very effect the moment I walked into that fourth grade classroom. The first thing that one of the boys said to me was that his peer who was right next to us was "gay." The boy who was the brunt of this social attack was very good natured about it. He smiled when he heard his classmate say that. But what do you think it does to a person to have that constant battering from your classmates throughout your twelve years of school? Different smart kids would exhibit different effects from this kind of constant abuse during their young years. But unless they're really agile, socially, and know how to pick their friends wisely, they will suffer these kinds of social problems. It's bad for their social development.

A young male teenager I was working with this last spring on a different community theatre play also had the same kind of senseless teasing and indignation which had developed around him from the other teens. He was ready to quit the play at one point, because of it. I had to address the older teenage girls pointedly and tell them they were being sexist in how they talked about boys.

That's only one of several thoughts that came to me as I had the pleasure of diving into this woman's mindset for the morning. That mindset of the face-value kind of person who sees the world as being self evident, is one of these last pieces of the puzzle, and I found two or three big models about the social dynamics in the world around me, crystallise in my mind today as I read this book.

I also had some big epiphanies about the field of political science, the beginnings of both the christian religion and the buddhist religion, how women's perspective on men has shifted between the original publication date of the book (1972), and today, and I also had a thought about the nature of love.

Here's to reading, I suppose.