In an accident of fate, I started the new year of 2011 eating cookies across a kitchen table from Norton Juster. I didn’t know he was Norton Juster—he just looked a little familiar, like a writer. We were talking about his house, and the work he’d put in on it when he’d first gotten it, when he mentioned having published his book. So I asked, what book? The Phantom Tollbooth, he said, and I realized who he was. “Oh, I love that book!” I said, because I really do, because it makes words come alive, and then I had to tell him my favorite line, which occurs early on, when Milo gets into the car and stops paying real attention to where he is, at which point he finds himself going along a road which looks “suspiciously like the wrong way.”
For me, this is a gorgeous use of language: it is evocative, it conveys emotion, it puts me inside a familiar experience in a new way—and it does all this very concisely, like poetry. Even though Milo is heading into trouble, there’s real optimism in the idea that if you are going the wrong way, you might be able to recognize it. And if Milo hadn’t wound up in the Doldrums, nearly trapped by the Lethargarians’ exhausting schedule of naps and meals and ways to put off any actual work or thinking until later, he would never have met Tock, probably the sweetest character in the book, and he wouldn’t have learned how important it is in a journey to appreciate the sights along the road.
Now here I am, starting out as the editor of Common Ground Review, in another sort of new year (added to the calendar year of 2011, the academic year 2011-2012, the Rosh Hashonah of 57720), another metaphorical journey, and I hope to be attentive, to find many wonderful things along the way, and to work with the help of my friends and colleagues at bringing the magazine somewhere that looks suspiciously like a good place to be.
Note:
I actually sang in the chorus of the Commonwealth Opera version of The Phantom Tollbooth: I got to be a Lethargarian. The best part is that in addition to Juster’s words and Feiffer’s drawings, I also have Arnold Black’s music in my head for the complete and resonant experience that I look for in poetry (and find in the good stuff).
