Last weekend, when I drove for 16 hours in two days for a wedding (ahem!) I had many opportunities to self-reflection, drowsiness, observing the landscape around me (Pennsylvania? Amish folk?), and listening to things. One of the things I listened to was the The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, narrated by David Hyde Pierce. And it was lovely.
First of all, the book was written written in 1961, and has fabulous illustrations by Jules Feiffer which still stick in my head, even when listening to the book. The book is a witty adventure story, in which Milo, a boy with endless ennui, goes on an adventure because of a mysterious tollbooth that manifests itself in his room. Milo visits all sorts of places: dictionopolis (where words are bought and sold and are edible!), expectations (imagine the puns), digitopolis, the mountains of ignorance, and what not. Before receiving the tollbooth, Milo was a very dissatisfied person: he was never happy, no matter what he was doing, and he was always looking to be where he wasn't. He was always looking forwards or backwards, and could never be present. (Well, doesn't that sound familiar????) Milo's subsequent adventures teach him the value of many things that he took for granted, such as:
1) Education: Milo realizes that he has so much to learn about words, numbers, sounds, wisdom, and that when you learn something, you never know when it will be useful again.
2) How to appreciate life as it is. Milo is unhappy initially with his array of toys, his life, etc, and he realizes that he takes everything for granted!
3) Generosity and concern for others: Milo learns to care for Tock and the Humbug, and to try to help others when their plight is grave. By rescuing Rhyme and Reason, Milo is learning to help others as a means to help himself.
4) Time: The most significant character in the book, aside from Milo, is Tock, the WATCHdog. He is always reminding Milo to use time wisely, to know that time passes quickly, and that everyone's presence is a temporal gift. Tock teaches Milo to be mindful of his life and time. And at the end of the book, there is a very interesting issue in which Milo must go home to his own life and family, and despite his desire to stay in the kingdom of wisdom, he realizes that everything changes, and all things end. (Hmm!!!!)
For me, as a buddhist-y children's lit loving girl, this book was as powerful as it was when I was smaller. It teaches us how to become aware of our lives, how to be curious, to be mindful, to be kind, to be generous: all without being didactic or condescending. In some ways, it is almost spiritual in trajectory- Milo's adventures teach him mindfulness and awareness, skills we all aim to develop. Some of the quotes were so poetic, so relevant to Buddhist philosophy, and perhaps all philosophy, that I'll share a few.
"But it's not just learning things that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters."
"..the most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what's in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that. Then one day someone discovered that if you walked as fast as possible and looked at nothing but your shoes you would arrive at your destination much more quickly. Soon everyone was doing it. They all rushed down the avenues and hurried along the boulevards seeing nothing of the wonders and beauties of their city as they went.No one paid any attention to how things looked, and as they moved faster and faster everything grew uglier and dirtier, and as everything grew uglier and dirtier they moved faster and faster, and at last a very strange thing began to happen. Because nobody cared, the city slowly began to disappear. Day by day the buildings grew fainter and fainter, and the streets faded away, until at last it was entirely invisible. There was nothing to see at all."
“You’ll find,” he remarked gently, “that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that’s hardly worth the effort.”
"You must never feel badly about making mistakes," explained Reason quietly, "as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons."
