I had the fleeting idea that if I were to touch the page, I might be flashed back to a place of silks and mirrors and a laughing girl, and that if I were to squint or tip my head at the right angle, I might go deeper still, through the story and out the other side, into the hazy Indo-European folkways where the stories began. There I was, sitting in a modern office building, with trucks and cars rumbling up nearby Madison Avenue, and for a fraction of a second the book before me seemed to become a portal, like a wardrobe into Narnia or a portkey at Hogwarts, that could fling me into the past. Now the pages were fragile, crisp, and speckled with age spots. Tales of My Mother Goose! More than three centuries ago, a careful hand (possibly Perrault’s son, Pierre) had dipped a pen in ink and in beautiful cursive committed the world’s first known collection of fairy tales to this folio. On the wooden door behind the spindle holder, a sign reads: “Contes de Ma Mere l’Oye.” Curled up by the fire, a plump little cat listens, too. She seems to be telling a story to three young people in elegant clothes, one of whom leans forward, touching the storyteller’s knees in her eagerness. A plain-faced woman in a linen coif and rustic dress sits before a fire, holding a spindle of wool. Nelson opened to the frontispiece, revealing a charming little painting. This beautiful object had been created in 1695 as a gift for the teenage niece of Louis the Fourteenth, a girl known as “Mademoiselle.”
Inside, its glossy red leather binding embossed with gold, was the earliest surviving volume of the fairy tales of Charles Perrault. She drew out a small navy-blue case and opened the lid. I was sitting across from her, in her office. “We almost never take this out because it is really fragile,” said Christine Nelson, a curator at the Morgan Library in New York. Grounded in neuroscience and behavioural research, The Enchanted Hour explains the cognitive and social-emotional benefits that await children who are read to, not least engaging their minds in complex narratives, fostering imagination and kindling a lifelong appreciation of language stories and pictures. A miracle occurs when one person reads to another, when words on a page are transformed into dynamic quests that move the heart, brain and imagination.
0 kommentar(er)
