I’ve heard many people remark recently that they “just couldn’t get into the ‘Little House’ books.” By this, they mean that the novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder do not appeal to them. I’m not sure if this opinion is even worse than the gleeful scorn of those who like to point out that Wilder’s real life experiences were not as rosy as the fictionalized account. What is won by observing that reality entails hardships that fiction can blunt and transform? Isn’t that the point?
Many beloved stories are based on real-world experiences, transmuting them into a spectacle of unquestionable beauty. Though, as we see increasingly, writers can just as well take real life and make it more grotesque and full of despair in dystopian stories of futile materialism. Along with Pollyanna, I prefer the former.
After the vapidity of certain music professing to be Christian, I was drawn back to the Hillbilly Thomists. Theirs is a lively poetry and soulful tune. I’m especially keen on “Weight of Eternal Glory.” Take these verses in the middle:
Found myself down in Nashville
In a place just off of Broadway
Sitting at thе bar was a lovely cowgirl
She had a teardrop in her eye
I said, “Lady do I know you
If I don’t, then I think that I’d like to”
She just turned to me with sadness
And said, “Honey, I’m not gonna lie”
I am suffering under the weight of eternal glory
I find my place in the good Lord’s story
I keep His promises by my bed
Take the hand of the loving Savior
Guides my way while I still stay here
You can find the same way yourself dear
If you just let yourself be led
If you’ve ever met people who frequent bars, they don’t tend to talk like this. Wouldn’t it be marvelous, but for one song, to live in a world where sad-eyed country ladies feeling sorry for themselves over a drink could reply in poetic verse about the weight of eternal glory and what supernatural faith does in their lives?
Yes, fiction is meant to make the world better and more shining, a foretaste of what is to come. That is not to say there is not sadness, destruction, and suffering in this life. But all that evil is why we need good stories more, not less.
That does not mean that we should not have stories of difficulty. There will always be a place for Dolly Parton called her “sad ass songs,” ballads about injustice, lost love, death, and betrayal. But the context of those stories is still the big, beautiful world of possibilities. It is comprehensibly sad because we understand that there is a possibility of it being otherwise. As the Jesuits used to inquire, “Where is the redemptive value?”
And if you still don’t like Wilder’s “Little House” books, then you’re a lost cause for patriotism and feeling for your fellow man. Though that might be a curable condition with immersion in the right fiction of high quality and lyrical excellence.
