THINKING “CROOKED”

Taranaki Daily News, 18 December 1926, Page 18

THINKING “CROOKED”

A FANTASY.

(By.

Philippa Kendrick

mien we think of . crooked thoughts, we visualise- instinctively the thoughts of crooked people in the ugliegt; 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 .greeneyed goblins thrust the fairies out of sight. A world where' malice and envy prowl -by night and day; where cruetly stalks in the wake of innocence;-where storm sweeps over the sun.

heaven,' where “crooked” thoughts most joyously belong. There are other ways of thinking “crooked.” There are the crooked thoughts that go zig-zagging round all sorts of ugly corners to find some hidden loveliness beyond. Thoughts that lift the common-place to : fairy magic. Thoughts that are deliberately, beautifully, fascinatingly,', whimsically, crooked, calling us from the straight line of the beaten track and leading ils by countless little curly bypaths to the fairies’ ring.

When - Barrie thinks ■ “crooked”; —like the children—he given us a Peter Pan. Urookedy thoughts can belong to, allegory and fantasy and moonlight and golden, apples and silver trees, no less than‘to poisonous swamps and fearsome fbrests. The crooked, twist 'can show us glamour no less than gloom. Crookedy thoughts gave us ' ' our nursery 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 for them! They go on showing us, eternally, that there is another aspect to crooki thinking. An aspect that, one may ponder over when crooked thinking of the adult order makes us despair of human nature. Envy and malice think crooked in the dark; but whimsy, and caprice, and fantasy, and dream, think their flarllng little crooked thoughts in the' light of the sun and moon ■ and stars, to keep our heart’s young and wake the laughter in our tired eyes.