Impossible Tales

in which there are happy endings

Dear Readers,

In high school, mathematics didn’t interest me. I did them – and went so far as to take AP Calculus junior year – but at the first opportunity, I quit maths and have not thought about them in 30 years. Everything was solvable, provable – reducible to an answer. Even imaginary numbers didn’t live up to their name. No doubt, Higher Mathematics is an adventurous land of unprovable theories where only the most intrepid minds may venture. But the portal to that fantastical world begins in the desert of algebra, geometry, and calculus and did not tempt me to explore further.

I almost make my handicap with numbers sound like a creative virtue. I was fortunate not to struggle with a real disability – only a disinterest – but my 17-year-old son Jack has had a different experience. All his life, every day, he has fought to overcome a difficult impediment to do well in school. He has idiopathic hypersomnia, which is Latin for “needs an outrageous amount of sleep that never restores him, and we don’t know why.” It’s a mysterious neurological disorder – for which there is no known cure – that causes sleep never to translate to rest. He fights the demon of overwhelming exhaustion moment by moment and has been caught asleep during exams, meals, parties, classes, track meets – never while driving, thankfully. The prosaic details of daily living and homework are a slog through which he must battle using weapons like organization, scheduling, mnemonic mantras, and a variety of medications – rather uninspiring, mundane tools.

But pit him against another man in a game of skill or tell him that a path is thorny or difficult, and he will come alive in the attempt to defeat his opponent, be it Nature or Man (or Sister). The threat of the impossible battle awakens him.

I have seen this happen on many occasions in his life from competitive basketball games to heated debates. One small example occurred on the way home from school one day in February of 2022. My children and I were listening to the radio news coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when my daughter India, then 12 years old, asked why the President wasn’t sending troops to rescue the Ukrainians. I replied that that would be an unpopular decision as most Americans don’t want to send their children to die protecting other countries far from home. Jack, 14 years old at the time (and always in a narcoleptic slumber in the car), perked up and surprised us that he’d been listening. He said with quiet confidence:

“I would go fight for them.”

His craving for justice, heedless of the unknown and athwart his exhaustion, burned like a story within him – a fairy tale awakening brought about by magic.

My daughter India, too, from a young age yearned for the impossible. One Christmas, knowing India’s love for play-acting and costumes, my mother (a Baby Boomer) gave her an appropriately sized set of scrubs and a doctor’s kit with the requisite child-sized stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, thermometer, etc. India wrinkled her five year-old nose at the costume, said thank you in a disappointed tone, gave her grandmother a hug, and moved on to her next gift. My mother was distressed that her carefully selected present – meant to lift India’s aspirations from Playing Princess to Pursuing Women’s Liberation – had not captured India’s imagination. My mother claimed India’s attention.

“It’s a doctor's costume,” she explained brightly. “You can start a hospital in your room and treat your stuffed animals or have your friends over to play. There’s a white lab coat, too.”

India looked at my mother in confusion and arrested us all when she said:

“But Grand, anybody can be a doctor.”

Gloria Steinem, 91 years old, has lived to see this moment.

Being a princess, on the other hand – only the accident of birth or being chosen by a prince could make that a reality. It’s impossible – unattainable – and therefore worth imagining.

As I near the end of my 5th decade, I have grown “old enough to start reading fairy tales again,” just as C.S. Lewis promised in his preface to The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. I’m drawn to happy, impossible endings in a hopeful way that leaves the sophistication of my 20’s and 30’s behind. For many years, I resisted reading or writing hopeful stories because they seemed simple, easy, childish. Now they seem truer than the brokenness that surrounds us.

In a letter to his son Christopher,¹ J.R.R. Tolkien compared the joy of a happy ending to “relief as if a major limb out of joint has suddenly snapped back.” Our joy “perceives that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made.” In other words, the happy ending reveals how things are supposed to be – and our resonant response confirms that we know it.

Most of my reading these days focuses on the medieval period as I research my next novel. I want my characters’ thoughts and actions to flow from a medieval mindset without a hint of modernity. Is it possible for me to shed generations of accumulated assumptions and to reject the sense that we in 2025 have reached the pinnacle of understanding – that all beliefs of the past were blinkered? Is this fish called Kate even aware of the water she swims in? Time will tell.

My April 29th post, “The Key: A Medieval Mystery” was my first attempt to discard my modern habits. Before the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment, medieval thought bordered on the magical. Medieval people believed in the impossible because the sun rose every morning, and they didn’t know why or how but by the hand of God. Without an awareness of chlorophyll and its role in absorbing light to fuel the process of photosynthesis, whereby a tree converts sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into glucose and oxygen – the growth of a tree was magical. Its thriving and its withering were brought about by God himself, the maker and sustainer of all things. Today, God seems less important and less powerful when we can explain his tricks – and sometimes perform them ourselves. With irrigation, artificial sunlight, and genetic engineering to make plants bug-resistant, we’re the gods now.

Though there are many excellent, modern reasons not to keen for the Middle Ages – Chick-fil-A, primarily – their medieval sense of wonder I would gladly regain. From the ecstasy of healing after a pilgrimage to the terror experienced during a solar eclipse, a medieval man’s awe at the world’s mysteries and his acceptance of the inexplicable would require us to willingly suspend our disbelief, as we do when reading a fairy tale or watching a fantasy movie. The Middle Ages were an Age of Faith, as Will Durant named the medieval volume of his epic series The Story of Civilization – faith in God, certainly, but also in the supernatural, generally. For some, the power of God could have been mistaken for magic.

Take, for example, “abracadabra,” the familiar word invoked by magicians when performing their tricks. It is an ancient saying with debatable origins. The most compelling etymology I read says it derives from the Aramaic words “ebra kedabra” (אברא כדברא), meaning “I create like the word” or “I create like I speak.” Medieval people, whether they could read the Latin Bible or not, would have been told by their priests that God created the world with words when he said, “Let there be light!”² – indeed, that he “created like he spoke,” or abracadabra. In a metaphorical sense, God was the world’s first and best magician, and all mysteries originated with him – or with his angelic creation, Satan, twisted with sin and powerful enough to make trouble. A medieval Christian’s hope lay in the power of Jesus, “the Word made flesh,”³ casting out demons with merely a word – spoken in the Aramaic language of abracadabra.

Medieval people – from illiterate peasants to kings and queens – all believed in miracles. An amulet prayed over by a priest would protect the owner from the plague. An herbal remedy administered by a physician could cure the patient when accompanied by a prayer. At mass, mere bread and wine transmuted into the body and blood of Christ before their very eyes when the priest spoke the words of the Eucharist – hoc est corpus meum (“This is my body”⁴), better known in these post-Enlightenment days as “hocus pocus.”

Steeped in supernatural belief, the medieval period feels like a fairy tale – not that it was ideal with its plagues and filth and famine and lack of air conditioning, but that the threats were overwhelming, the people were vulnerable, and the supernatural was a viable source of rescue. That world in which the miraculous and the mundane coexist has been the setting for myriad modern fairy tales. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is medieval in its technology, feudalism, and costuming, as are its literary and filmic descendants Game of Thrones, Pillars of the Earth, Wheel of Time, The Witcher, and every other streaming-service’s attempt to invoke that mystery and capitalize on our yearning to suspend our disbelief.

My upcoming novel, set in 1348 when the bubonic plague arrived in London, takes place in this mystical time. Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague, was unknown, as were the antibiotics that now save us from it. The terrifying and deadly illness was seen as God’s wrath unleashed on a wicked world, and only his mercy – sought through prayers, pilgrimages, and penitence – could rescue them. Our fairy tales were perfected in this age of terror when a person’s miraculous rising from her sickbed after grappling with the plague foreshadowed Snow White and Sleeping Beauty’s awakening from their slumbers of death. Evil in the guise of Wicked Stepmothers and embittered Witches could hold no power over the love wielded by the Prince – who would traverse any distance to find the princess and defeat the thorny hedge that surrounded her. Mythical rescues and happy endings, though far from our lived experience, feel true and right: the way things should be.

The Prince Entering the Briar Wood, by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones

Our struggles in modern America aren’t against famine, plague, and rapacious monarchs. In general, we have enough (even too much) to eat; we have antibiotics and modern medicine; and, imperfect as it is, we have a democracy. Yet, we still have (or are) wicked stepmothers. The poorest still go hungry. Even the most fortunate suffer incurable disabilities. And worst of all, in spite of our best efforts, everyone is going to die. This is the shared terror that no sophistication, technological innovation, or philosophy can conquer. And so we tell stories of living happily ever after.

These are the stories I want to write: ones in which our actual struggles are untangled and our pain is healed by a magical mercy that we don’t deserve and can’t control. They are the happy endings we still crave today, but they feel less saccharine when placed in a less skeptical age. “The Key” was the first of a series exploring the characters in my upcoming novel, and I’ll continue to write these hopeful stories every month or so because the medieval age of fairy tales is a complementary setting for the jewel of truth.

Only something impossible – unattainable even by our smartest people or most advanced technology – is drastic enough to rescue us from death. Only the ultimate paradox – whispered through the ages and reimagined in our stories – is wild enough to be true: God became man and broke into our briar prison, wearing a crown of thorns, to rescue us from the sleep of death. The infinite became finite, died, and came alive again. And because that impossible barrier was breached, other impossible things can come true. Sickness will transmute to health; blindness to sight; paralysis to dancing; skepticism to belief.

Sleepers, awake – and live happily ever after.

The hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night is far gone; the day is at hand.
Romans 13:11-12

1. Carpenter, Humphrey ed. Letter 89. The Letters of JRR Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

2. Genesis 1:3

3. The Gospel of John 1:14

4. The Gospel of Matthew 26:26