Castles

I talk about castles... a lot. They're like beacons. Actual stone proof of something grand and the possibility of something magical.


Obviously, as a child I loved castles. Who doesn't? That's when you love them in theory, in fantasies, in the stories you make up for yourself, late at night, when you can sleep, and you play all the characters.


Then you wise up. The shine wears off your optimism. People start to tell you that castles are awful-- drafty, remote, impossible to heat, expensive, impossible to keep from falling apart. Possibly even worse than that, they keep getting turned into museums or banks or funeral homes or insane asylums.


Being in America, you have very little real experience with them though. You can only go off these stories you hear and what other people tell you. And it turns out that while these people may technically be right, actually, they are dead dead wrong.


Because when you see a castle in real life, you realize one remarkable, soul-soaring truth: castles are perhaps the only thing in life I've seen so far that as good (or better) both in real life and in adulthood.


Imagining the way life was, the way it would go, how many things can you think of that actually surpassed your expectations when they actually transcended your imagination? Or how many of the things from your childhood remained unsullied by adulthood...continued to loom as large and magical as when you made up worlds for yourself late at night?


The first time I saw a castle in real life-- it was the first time my Dad and I went to Scotland-- we drove a car we rented and we'd pull off the road anytime there was the roadmap icon for one. We went castle-chasing for two weeks. Because after the first one, I couldn't stop thinking about them. How miraculous they were! How easy it was to feel awe in their midsts. The only thing to own up to their end of the imagination covenant. Still standing, still majestic despite a completely different way of living, still asking you to contemplate that majesty-- especially your own.


A castle, of course, is a metaphor. And of course, part of what's good about this revelation for me is the metaphor, but part of what makes a castle truly marvelous (something to marvel at)  is not just want it stands for, but what it literally is. It is the Borromean Knot-- all at once Real, Symbolic, Imaginary. It is literally as good as you thought it would be. (or better!) And how many things we held as sacred as children can we still say that about?


So I keep on believing in as many castles of the world as I can-- the ones in Scotland and Italy and Austria-- anywhere I can find them, so for a moment, I can stand back and experience awe.