ON THINKING “CROOKED”

New Zealand Times, Volume LIV, Issue 12650, 10 January 1927, Page 4

ON THINKING “CROOKED”

A FANTASY - -'.'jVj (By Philippa Kendrick.) When we think of crooked thoughts wa visualise instinctively the thoughts of crooked people in the ugliest sense. The sort of thoughts that wander in dark, haunted forests of evil, like shadowy, distorted shapes. Thoughts that are native to a world .where green-eyed goblins thrust the fairies out of sight. A world where malice and envy prowl by night and day; where cruelty stalks in the wake of innocence; where storm sweeps over the sun. But there are other regions, thank heaven, 'where “crooked” thoughts most joyously belong. There are other ways of thinking “crooked.” There are the crooked thoughts that go zigzagging round all sorts of ugly corners to find some hidden loveliness beyond. Thoughts that lift the commonplace to fairy magic. Thoughts that are deliberately, beautifully, fascinntingly, whimsically crooked, calling us from the straight line of the beaten track and leading us by countless little curly by-paths to the fairies’ ring.

When Barrie thinks “crooked”—like the children—lie gives us a. Peter Pan. Cropkedy thoughts can. belong to allegory and fantasy, and moonlight and golden apples and silver trees, no less than to poisonous swamps and fearsome forests. The crooked twist can. show us glamour no Jess than g100m,.. , Crookedy thoughts gave na pup .nur--sery rhymes of yore and, “Alice, ,in

Wonderland”; as they have given us, in our later day, that crookedy little world of the child-mind visualised in the adorable A. A. Milne book, “When We Were Very Young.” Children, bless their bonny hearts, think “crooked” most of the time. No stereotyped straight lines fo. them! They go on showing us, eternally, that there is another aspect to crooked thinking. An aspect that one may ponder over when crooked thinking of tho adult order makes us "despair of human nature.

Envy and malice think crooked in the dnrk; but whimsy, and caprice, and fantasy, and dream, think their darling little crooked thoughts in the light of the sun and moon and stars, to keep onr hearts young and wake the laughter in our tired eyes.