Magic

It was a beautiful sunny day, with little white clouds that made the sky look extra blue.  I didn’t go out, as I need to recover from yesterday’s outing.  I’d like to be able to decide to head out as and when I want to, but we’re not quite there yet.  Here’s my wake up view today… he’s happily tucked in behind my knees and is yawning.  My handsome little guy 😊.   Don is curled up on the couch watching baseball with a little black ball that’s licking his toes.  I got the yawn, he gets licks.

So are there any people who object to a quick detour into wishing tree land?  If you do, I recommend <here> Which may or may not keep you amused!  There’s a children’s book series about a wishing tree, written by Enid Blyton, who was a highly prolific author of over 300 books for children in the first half of the 20th century.  This series is aimed at younger children, so it’s not at all scary, but there are a few books, and I remember wanting to climb up the tree (called the Magic Faraway Tree) It’s not great classic literature, but it’s certainly entertaining.  I miss magic.  My early childhood books had a plethora of magic and magical creatures.  They didn’t always grant wishes, so I didn’t think that would happen but I always hoped to find a fairy in my garden!  Toys would walk and talk at night when the humans were asleep, and animals could communicate with the fairies or with children sometimes.  I know now that dogs do talk to us, after all these years of living under the iron paw of the mini-dictator.  I’m not completely sure if my stuffed animals talk, or if they move… and I was warned that if they are donated to my baby niece and nephew, there will be horrifying and terrible consequences!  I think that I won’t test what they might be, so they’ll stay where they are.  As for other toys, Jerry has his collection that he guards, and if they’re stuffed, he attacks them, shreds them, stands proudly over the carnage and wags his stump of a tail!  Anyway, I miss magic.  I read fantasy, the “swords and sorcery” type because somebody does magic! Although I’d like to understand why the stories are set pre-electricity and pre-indoor plumbing.  You’d think that with magic those would be pretty easy to sort out?

I spoke to someone once who said that slavery suppressed invention (or words to that effect.). She made the case that if a society has an entrenched system of slavery, there’s no incentive to creating labour-saving devices because slaves did the work.   Plus, there’s another disincentive, that it’s possible to have too many slaves (in my opinion, that would be more than 1) which then creates a decline in productivity and will lead to a recession — which leads to war, then a plague and a pandemic, and then a technological renaissance after which magic disappears. I’ve found a few books that incorporate magic into everyday action, and I enjoy those quite a bit.  I like Arthur C Clarke’s assertion that “the technology of any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from magic.”  Our current reliance on technology would seem like using magic to our ancestors.  I’m a little greedy, and I want some Star Trek magic — transporters, replicators, travel faster than light, translators, tricorders, biobeds, and so on… and I’m sure that 30th century magic is even more awesome!

Have a magical night, everyone.  The magic that I’d like is the pill that regrows my organs and eliminates my cancer… any particular wishes that you’d like?