Peter Pan made me cry. Ashamed as I am to admit it, JM Barrie’s 120-year-old novella, a book intended for well-to-do British kids refusing to go to bed, made this jaded author—who scoffed at the overly saccharine storytelling in The Alchemist— ball like someone who’s never read a sappy story in his life.
Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can’t) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were as nice as a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.
J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Now you may be saying to yourself—huh?—did “the boy who never grew up” fly up to your window to bully you? No. Not that he’d never do that, because Peter can be mean at times, as boys around his age tend to be. But he stirred something in me I’d almost forgotten: the many wonders of childhood, the free-spirited joy that comes from innocence, and the magic of playing pretend. It’s the power of imagination that made me fall in love with storytelling in the first place and drives my writing ambitions to this day.
Pan is the ultimate metaphor for childhood, and all that entails, and Neverland, his home, is the place we yearn to return to, and why we feel nostalgia for past things. For children of the ’80s, Neverland is Star Wars, He-Man, GI*Joe, and Transformers. It’s the part of Fantasia reserved for the young, and I imagine that, for me, those pirates and fairies and Indians would be replaced by ninjas, and dungeons, and whatever crazy stuff we dreamed about as kids. And it’s a tragic thing knowing we can never go back there, that we lose these parts of ourselves as we mature into adulthood. I am convinced that losing this youthful spirit, this spirit embodied by Pan, is the reason we age and eventually die. So long as we remember to play, so long as we “kick the can,” the Grim Reaper can never catch up with us. But there is a silver lining to getting older, a way to tap into that old magic, and that’s by having children of our own, because Peter comes to visit us when we have kids. He may not be dressed in leaves with a dagger at his belt, and he may not even be called Peter—he is just the spirit of youth, after all—but that’s when we’ll get to meet him again, through the innocent eyes of our children.
Book review? Oh yes, Peter told me to give his book seventeen out of four stars. Who am I to argue?
The Art of Storytelling 
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