Too Old to Come Back
A Narnian Moment
There’s something about Autumn that makes me want to spend all day out of doors, crunching dry leaves between my fingers and smelling that dry, decaying aroma of a world getting ready for winter. Even when I go indoors, I carry in leaves and Queen Anne’s lace and grasses and fling open the windows to let in as much of the glorious Autumn as possible.
We love fall for the sweaters, boots, colors, and pumpkin spice lattes, but there’s something more powerful than aesthetic here. No other season feels so brief. Summer can be long and full, and winter drags on forever, at least in upstate New York. Autumn brings with it a reminder that the days are passing away.
Winter is coming. The trees’ vibrant hues betray the bleakness to come. The dying of the year reminds me that all things end. Children grow up, houses fall, and one day I will die.
It might sound funny, but this isn’t a melancholy feeling. This reminder of endings and death connects me to the millennia of lives and civilizations that had their end. There’s something glorious and human and more than human about an ending. Only by ending can we begin again.
C.S. Lewis’s works are replete with this feeling. In Surprised by Joy he describes the “Joy” that haunted him all his life, “the stab, the pain, the inconsolable longing” for something he couldn’t describe. It’s a little like nostalgia, a little like growing up, but it also conjures up feelings beyond our own experiences and pleasures. It makes us homesick for a place we’ve never known.
It’s what makes Narnia and Middle Earth and Hogwarts feel like a real part of our childhood; it’s how sensible ten-year-olds who stopped believing in Santa Claus long ago can still wonder if they’ll find a world in a wardrobe, or if a letter will arrive inviting them to a wizarding school.
This longing is so deep that “aging out” of it is heartbreaking. Rarely have I identified with characters as strongly as when Aslan tells the younger Pevensie children that they are too old to return to Narnia.
‘Please, Aslan,’ said Lucy. ‘Before we go, will you tell us when we can come back to Narnia again? Please. And oh, do, do, do make it soon.’
‘Dearest,’ said Aslan very gently, ‘you and your brother will never come back to Narnia.’
‘Oh, Aslan!!’ said Edmund and Lucy both together in despairing voices.
‘You are too old, children,’ said Aslan, ‘and you must begin to come close to your own world now.’
‘It isn’t Narnia, you know,’ sobbed Lucy. ‘It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?’
‘But you shall meet me, dear one,’ said Aslan.
‘Are – are you there too, Sir?’ said Edmund.
‘I am,’ said Aslan. ‘But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.’
When I was fifteen, the wardrobe door swung shut and I realized that I, too, was too old. I wrote down my feelings after watching Prince Caspian (2008), which for all its flaws captured Peter and Susan’s sadness at leaving Narnia for the last time. I’m grateful that I saved the paper on which I wrote these reflections. I’ll include a few excerpts here.
“I received a shock after watching Prince Caspian. The part when Aslan tells Peter and Susan that they are too old to return to Narnia always touches me. Each time it reminds me that I am rapidly leaving childhood. I know I’m too old to ever go to Narnia. This feeling overwhelmed me, and I felt that I’d wasted my childhood. How many memories had I made? How many adventures had I braved? Emotion welled up and poured from my eyes. I felt ashamed of each time I’d wasted a day on video games or movies, or worse, wished that my life would move forward. Sometimes I wished that childhood would be over. I realize, now, that one cannot stand with one foot on each boat. The brevity of childhood is somewhat determined by one’s determination to move on or linger.
More and more, everything seems a race. To where? It depends. Dates, money, being attractive, college, grades, sports, everything feels like a competition. I want to stop and smell the roses. Spend a day hiking on a nature trail, or reading a good book by a slow stream. Perhaps just taking time to record my thoughts. I want to mope and weep, but that won’t help anything. I want childhood to last as long as it will, and when it’s over, hopefully I can greet the new ship while treasuring the old one always. I don’t want to forget. I know I will, but I hope to remember the sweetest memories. Playing in the woods with my sisters…writing the newsletter with cousins…giving poor but well-meaning advice to friends…laughing with the ones I love. I hope never to forget these wonderful moments, and I hope the people I shared them with will remember as well. I hope they know that these times, and the ones I’ve already forgotten, will always be precious to the part of me that doesn’t forget. I hope they know that they are all my great childhood adventure that I thought I’d never have. I hope they know I love them.
I could make fun of my melodramatic reflections, especially the ending. It seems like I’m giving my goodbyes before I die, and anyone could remark that I’m just sad that I can’t go to an imaginary land anymore. I won’t make fun of my past self, though. The end of childhood is a kind of death.
It wasn’t the growing up I hated so much as the idea that adventures were over, or worse, that I had misspent my childhood and had been unworthy of Narnia. This is nonsense, naturally. Although Lucy and Peter are nearly perfect, most of the children called to Narnia the first time did not deserve it. Narnia improved them. Besides, I had a really lovely childhood, with friends and siblings to act out great stories in the woods.
I had (as Louisa May Alcott put it about another fifteen-year-old) “the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly shooting up into a woman and didn’t like it.” I dreaded the thought that the miseries of adolescence would continue into adulthood. I feared an end like Susan’s, who “wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age” and ceased to be a “friend of Narnia.”
Unlike in Neverland, it’s not just the loss of childhood innocence — I don’t think that Lewis idealizes that as much as Barrie does — but the loss of Narnia, of wonder, of Aslan. We fear a prosaic adulthood. We will get lost in work and pleasure, caring about reputation and money and stability, and never again catch sight of such beauty.
I would comfort that fifteen-year-old girl — and any other teenager who both dreads and longs for adulthood — that fourteen years haven’t changed me very much. There is less free time to play and wander now, and some days the mundane overwhelms me, but wonder is not the exclusive gift of childhood. After all, The Chronicles of Narnia was written by a red-faced, plump, middle-aged man. Many books and movies and music and paintings will stir up joy, as long as you don’t consume them to impress people. And people – friends – spouses – children – dead authors you imagine conversations with – will spark still more. The natural world is no less beautiful today than it was when you were a child. You may find yourself overwhelmed by inexpressible beauty while washing a dish, writing a story, holding a baby, or sitting quietly in church.
As Peter tells Edmund and Lucy when he ages out of Narnia, “It's all rather different from what I thought. You'll understand when it comes to your last time.”
Consider the adult Lucy, as seen through Tirian’s eyes when they all go to Aslan’s Country in The Last Battle:
‘Yes,’ said Queen Lucy. ‘In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.’ It was the first time she had spoken, and from the thrill in her voice, Tirian now knew why. She was drinking everything in even more deeply than the others. She had been too happy to speak.
Lucy had obeyed Aslan; she had “grown close to her own world” and learned who he was there. Instead of hurrying or lingering through life, she had used the time well. We don’t know exactly how she spent those years, but we see that her trust and love – which had always helped her see and follow Aslan before her siblings – have only grown. Worship and wonder come naturally to her. She is at home in heaven.
As the song that played during the final scene of the 2008 Prince Caspian movie says, “Then that word grew louder and louder, till it was a battle-cry: ‘I’ll come back when you call me. No need to say goodbye.’”
Eventually, we all grow too old for Narnia. We grow too old for this world, too. That doesn’t mean the best things about them will be lost to us forever.
What makes Narnia, Narnia?
Aslan, and he remains when night falls on Narnia.
We lose nothing when the first world passes away and the real adventure begins.
I suppose that’s why I love Autumn, why I pile on sweaters so I can let this fifty-degree air into my house.
I can smell Aslan’s Country on an Autumn breeze.