I was revisiting Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson today, reading it to my nephew on a train from Stuttgart to Freiburg. It was one of my favorite books when I was little and I was glad my nephew asked me to read it to him. He's gotten bigger, my nephew. Smarter, more mischievous and, in a few years, perhaps he will qualify as diabolical. I'm already proud.
Reading Harold again I realized some themes I never picked up on as a kid. Sure, it's a cute story about an imaginative four-year-old who makes his own dream world, but think about it a moment. He draws landscapes, people, animals, plants, monsters and none of them are animate. It makes sense, in a way. The world he creates is static, just a picture in which he inhabits. But, what a desolate place. Unlike all those other little comforting little stories we were told as kids (Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz and so on) they had their friends and enemies, the products of a schizophrenic, sick mind, but ultimately a psyche that is not lonely. What a healthy and solipsistic world Harold creates.
I finished reading the story. My nephew was busy watching the landscape go by, asking "Are we still in Germany," to which I replied "Yes. We're still in Germany. We will be for a long time." The landscape grew, darkened and shifted into the Black Forest and I recalled stories of clever wolves and twisted fairies and the weird and the evil that I don't really believe in anymore. What a lonely little world. The sky changed to dusk, grey to purple on the horizon.
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