Small Worldview
January 1, 2003
The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common sense. —G.K. Chesterton, "In Defence of Baby Worship" All happy families resemble one another. All families returning from Disney World are unhappy. Their unhappiness results from the unavoidable realization, both in the park and on the way home, of the small but growing gap between hope and experience. The trip to a Disney theme park has never, will never, indeed, can never live up to its own set of prepackaged and universally advertised expectations. To find oneself in a visually and psychologically sealed fantasy world and observe that the Tea Cups, which are large enough to sit in, are cracked, chipped, and peeling is unsettling enough. But worse still is that beneath the paint you see not cracked china or its cousin porcelain, or even its simulacrum, plaster of paris, but the rough industrial texture of woven fiberglass. To see this creates a minor existential crisis; it is something like Dorothy peering behind the curtain and finding neither a grand wizard, nor a small man, but instead a malfunctioning array of sparking wires and blinking lights. To see the process of production under which your imagination takes flight and through which you're relieved of the burden of self-consciousness is perhaps the most crushing blow of all, for it threatens not only your willingness to ever return to such a theme park but your very ability to suspend your awareness of the fact that we live in a good world gone wrong. For what the mind craves more than anything, and what the ...
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