Anna Holmes has successfully relocated across the country while actively jettisoning her adult literature in favor of preserving her picture books. The deliberate intellectual retreat is being hailed as a courageous reclamation of childlike wonder by adults deeply terrified of modern existence.
Anna Holmes, writing in The Wonder Reader, has proudly documented her recent cross-country migration, an odyssey notable not for the geographic distance traversed, but for the deliberate, wholesale jettisoning of her adult literary classics; an act she defends not as a surrender to the agonizing complexities of the human condition, but as the vital preservation of a way of engaging with the world that adulthood supposedly trains out of us. By sacrificing the adult canon to the donation bin while fiercely guarding her children's books, Holmes asserts that maturity does not require abandoning the things that first shaped our experience; a thesis which conveniently ignores that the things which first shaped our experience were largely characterized by a profound, drooling ignorance of our own mortality.
It is a fascinating, if deeply alarming, cultural symptom; one is immediately forced to consider the fourteenth-century mystic text The Cloud of Unknowing, which famously counsels the seeker to abandon all earthly intellect to encounter the divine, alongside the sprawling, suffocating moral architecture of George Eliot's Middlemarch, and, for reasons that remain entirely opaque to the serious scholar, the 1993 Haynes Repair Manual for the Honda Civic. We are forced to reckon with a cultural paradigm in which the adult reader, faced with the psychic interiority demanded by the latter two texts, simply opts to look at a pop-up book instead, elevating the simplistic moral binaries of anthropomorphic bears over the taxing demands of mature prose.
Mac Barnett, a children's author who has apparently committed his terrestrial existence to the notion that a board book possesses the same narrative utility as Tolstoy, argues that when we dismiss children's books, what we are really doing is failing to recognize the potential of children. This is, to be certain, a dazzling piece of rhetorical sleight-of-hand; it demands we equate the adult refusal to confront complex sociopolitical realities with a noble, empathetic defense of the youth, rather than identifying it as a desperate, terrified retreat into the frictionless utopia of talking farm animals.
The adult mind, having gazed into the terrifying, fathomless abyss of human isolation, has apparently decided to pull the duvet over its head and demand a story where the little engine successfully ascends the hill.
The abdication of maturity is now complete. Holmes and her contemporaries have relieved themselves of the exhausting burden of moral ambiguity, curating their personal libraries so that they might never again be accosted by a narrative that does not resolve itself within fourteen illustrated pages. We are left to witness the twilight of the adult reader, who, when asked to parse the profound tragedies of the modern era, proudly points to a drawing of a very hungry caterpillar and declares the matter settled.