Ian M. Anderson

"England and Scotland slid past the litter of the king of the Shadows. ...The sea was not frozen; for all the stars shone as clear out of the deeps below as they shone out of the deeps above; and as the bearers slid along the blue-gray surface, with never a furrow in their track, so pure was the water beneath, that the king saw neither surface, bottom, nor substance to it, and seemed to be gliding only through the blue sphere of heaven, with the stars above him, and the stars below him, and between the stars and him nothing but an emptiness, where, for the first time in his life, his soul felt that it had room enough." -- from "The Shadows," by George MacDonald For now it's enough to see his shaking hand as he writes. Do you see it? Just above the paper, hovering: The pen scratches out words, stops. How the hand trembles! If you watched long enough, you'd see how the flicker of his oil lamp keeps time for him. The pen, the hand, the flame -- when he wri...

"Are there fairies in the desert?" Now, this question, which is not for the faint of heart, skipped off the lips of my boy at a late hour -- so you'll have to forgive me for my answer: "You know fairies aren't really real, right?" "Dad," he said, rolling away from me in his bed sheets and then back, a teddy in tow. His tone said it all before he continued. "I know -- but are there?" This is a perilous situation. When the moon is out, the bedtime story has already been read, and sleep is yet to advance upon the throne of the young child's brow, well, dangerous words spill forth. You understand, I'm sure. Those dangerous words are generally ushered in with a sigh, and then something like, "Oh, I don't know." The look in his eye alerted me fully to my mistake. As is already obvious, the chief problem is not the answer in itself, but the origin of said answer: Such words are conceived not when the question is to...