Saving the world without getting out from under the bed

When we save the world, through metrics, and regimentation of others, what do we and they become in the process? I have a new friend, age nine, Tutor's Tutee. She lives lone with her mother in a huge castle, alone unless you include the hired help, like Tutor. Her name is Audrey. What Tutor tells her is that she must save the world before she reaches age 10 or so, because then she will become a Stupid Grownup, and when grownups try to save the world, they become monsters, acting out. They try to fix the world as they try to fix Audrey, and that only makes things ever so much worse, as Audrey well knows.  "Only the kids can save us," Tutor tells her at nap time and story time, "but only if they never ever grow up." He makes her promise that she will never grow up, or if she does, that she stay alive in the big person she is doomed to become. Bill Schambra says it differently, in this review of The Philanthropic Revolution, but he is of this visionary company. A warrior in the world, but the kind of man who could put Audrey to bed with tale from the Brothers Grimm, telling her the necessary truths of our fallen world. Far better reading for her than Joseph Campbell, a Ted Talk, or some of the usual BS about the Quest, or the Journey. We are going nowhere. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Rags to riches to rags. The seasons go in circles. So does Fortune's Wheel. We are as saved as we can be, right now, between two beats of a sleeping child' heart.

Comments

[tm]

It is possible to tell the Audreys of our lives complicated things in story form, and it's so much better than Joe C., Ted T., or BS about anything. There is a vernacular that is not stupid, not populist, not journalistic, not crowdpleasing, that gives all of us, no matter what we know or have by way of experience, insight, a grasp of big things, a glimpse. All this Shakespeare knew, as you say. As did Montaigne, Sophocles, Lubitsch, Mel Brooks on a good day, and perhaps Audrey. No one not on Fortune's wheel, but professionals will make it seem you can get off.

[Phil Cubeta]

Thank you, Tom. Wasn't it I.A. Richards who said, two generations ago, "A poem is a machine to think with"? I miss the old days of blogging when we kept up a lit-inspired cross site conversation, in the presence of whomever showed up.

[Christine Egger]

I see a book and a tour and and an off-Broadway play. No wait, a movie starring Meryl Streep. Definitely Meryl Streep.

[Phil Cubeta]

She would be perfect. But we need Clint Eastwood as The Happy Tutor, too. As for Audrey, she is new Shirley Temple, for changing times.

[tm]

I fear that's moved to FB and Twitter, Phil.

[Phil Cubeta]

I fear that AKMA has, bad enough he moved to Oxford.