On Sunday morning, February 13, 2000, millions of people opened their newspapers and found Snoopy sitting where he had been sitting for nearly half a century.
On top of his doghouse.
At his typewriter.
It was one of the most familiar sights in American life. Snoopy had spent decades up there composing novels, rejection letters, memoirs, legal briefs and stories that tended to begin on dark and stormy nights. Charlie Brown was nearby. The neighborhood was still there. Nothing appeared terribly unusual.
Except that this time Snoopy was writing a different kind of letter.
“Dear Friends…”
Charles M. Schulz had died the night before.
He was seventy-seven years old. He had already announced his retirement after illness made it impossible to continue the relentless schedule of a daily comic strip. The Sunday pages had been prepared weeks in advance, so through one of those coincidences that seems almost too perfectly arranged to be true, Schulz’s final Peanuts appeared the morning after his death.
For almost fifty years there had always been another Charlie Brown coming.
Another baseball game.
Another psychiatric consultation with Lucy for five cents.
Another attempt to kick the football.
Another supper dish for Snoopy.
Another Great Pumpkin.
Another Monday.
But this time there wasn’t going to be a Monday.
How do you say goodbye to a world that has become part of people’s lives?
Schulz did something extraordinary.
He didn’t really end Peanuts.
He left them there.
And there is another great children’s story whose author actually put those words into the title of his last chapter.
The final chapter of A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner is called:
“In Which Christopher Robin and Pooh Come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There.”
Perhaps that is where this story really begins.
Not with an ending.
With a leaving.
Christopher Robin knows something is happening.
Pooh does not quite understand it.
That is part of what makes the final pages of The House at Pooh Corner so painful when encountered as an adult. A child can sense the sadness. An adult knows exactly what Christopher Robin is trying to say.
He is going away.
School is coming. Responsibilities are coming. The enormous machinery of growing up has begun moving, and even Christopher Robin cannot stop it.
Soon there will be places he has to go and things he has to do that Pooh cannot follow.
How do you explain that to a Bear?
Especially a Bear of Very Little Brain?
Christopher Robin tries.
Pooh listens.
And Milne does something merciful.
He does not show us Christopher Robin at seventeen.
We never see him packing for university. We do not watch him become busy and important. There is no melancholy scene of an elderly Christopher Robin discovering a battered stuffed bear in an attic and remembering the boy he once was.
Milne leaves the boy and his Bear together.
They walk to the Enchanted Place at the top of the Forest.
And we leave them there.
That distinction matters.
The Hundred Acre Wood does not vanish.
Pooh does not disappear.
Christopher Robin does not announce that childhood was foolish and that he has put away childish things.
The Forest remains exactly where it was.
We leave.
Maybe that is why the ending becomes sadder as we grow older.
When we first encounter Pooh, we naturally identify with Christopher Robin.
Eventually, without noticing exactly when it happened, we become the person looking back at him.
The Forest stayed where it was.
We were the ones who went away.
Charles Schulz seems to have understood something similar.
He could easily have created a grand finale for Peanuts.
Charlie Brown might finally have kicked Lucy’s football.
His baseball team might finally have won the championship.
The Little Red-Haired Girl might have knocked on his door.
Schroeder might have abandoned Beethoven and declared his love for Lucy.
Linus might have received incontrovertible proof of the Great Pumpkin.
Snoopy might have finished his novel.
Any of these would have been satisfying.
And every one of them would have been wrong.
Because Charlie Brown is not Charlie Brown after he finally kicks the football.
The football is part of Charlie Brown.
So is failure.
So is hope.
Especially hope.
He has to believe that this time Lucy will hold the football. Otherwise there is no reason to run toward it again.
Schulz understood his characters well enough not to rescue them from themselves at the last moment.
Nor did he show us what became of them.
There is no middle-aged Charlie Brown.
No adult Linus.
No elderly Lucy.
No explanation of whether Snoopy was merely an unusually imaginative dog or something much stranger.
Schulz was also clear that he did not want another cartoonist simply taking over Peanuts after him.
That makes the final strip even more remarkable.
He would not let someone else manufacture tomorrow.
But he wouldn’t destroy yesterday either.
So Snoopy remains on the doghouse.
Charlie Brown remains Charlie Brown.
The neighborhood is still there.
The world simply stops while it is alive.
Milne leaves Pooh in the Forest.
Schulz leaves Snoopy on the doghouse.
And then there is Calvin.
Bill Watterson found yet another way to do it.
The final Calvin and Hobbes appeared on December 31, 1995.
There is no farewell letter.
No explanation.
No retrospective montage.
No grown-up Calvin.
Instead, it has snowed.
The familiar world has disappeared beneath a clean white covering. Everything looks new.
Calvin and Hobbes stand looking at it.
The world has become a blank page.
And what do you do with a blank page?
You go exploring.
They climb onto the sled and head out into it together.
That is all.
It may be one of the happiest endings ever given to a beloved fictional world precisely because Calvin and Hobbes have no idea it is an ending.
Only we know.
For them it is morning.
Something new has happened.
There are hills to descend and things to discover.
We have reached the last panel.
They haven’t.
And suddenly three very different goodbyes seem to be speaking to one another.
Milne says:
We leave them there.
Schulz says:
I have to leave them now.
Watterson says:
They’re going somewhere without us.
The artist puts down the pen.
The reader closes the book.
But somewhere beyond that last panel, Calvin and Hobbes are still moving.
Perhaps the sled never reaches the bottom of the hill.
Perhaps it shouldn’t.
Kenneth Grahame understood enchanted places too.
The Wind in the Willows is full of them.
The River.
The Wild Wood.
Toad Hall.
And Mole End.
Mole’s little home is especially important because Mole leaves it almost accidentally.
At the beginning of the book he is spring-cleaning when something outside becomes irresistible. He abandons his work, scrambles into the sunlight and discovers the River.
Then Rat.
Then boats.
Then picnics.
Then Badger.
Then Toad, which is perhaps the sort of discovery one occasionally comes to regret.
Mole’s world gets bigger.
And then, in the winter chapter “Dulce Domum,” something remarkable happens.
Mole and Rat are walking home when Mole senses something.
His old home.
It is nearby.
He cannot see it, but he knows it.
Mole End has been sitting there all this time.
Waiting.
Mole initially tries to continue with Rat, embarrassed by the sudden pull of this little place he once left behind. But the longing becomes unbearable.
They go back.
The house is dusty and cold. Mole has been gone a long time.
Yet Rat helps him restore it. A fire is lit. Food appears. Field mice arrive.
Home becomes home again.
Grahame offers a variation on Milne’s enchanted place.
Sometimes the place we loved is somewhere we cannot remain.
But sometimes it is somewhere we need to find again.
Not because nothing has changed.
Precisely because we have.
The Mole who returns to Mole End is not the Mole who left it. He has seen the River. He has met Badger. He has survived Toad.
He has discovered a larger world.
And the larger world has not made his small home less valuable.
It has taught him what home means.
Elsewhere in The Wind in the Willows, Grahame goes further.
In “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” Rat and Mole experience something they cannot explain. Searching for Otter’s lost child, they encounter a presence of overwhelming beauty and awe.
And then the experience begins to slip away.
That forgetting is not presented simply as a tragedy. There are experiences so powerful that perhaps ordinary creatures could not go on living ordinary lives if they remembered them with full intensity forever.
Something is forgotten.
And something remains.
Which raises another possibility.
Perhaps forgetting is not the same thing as losing.
We forget enormous portions of childhood.
Rooms.
Faces.
Afternoons.
Voices.
The exact sound of a screen door at a house that no longer exists.
And yet those things helped make us.
Maybe an enchanted place can remain inside us even when we can no longer draw the map.
J. M. Barrie turns the whole question around.
Peter Pan doesn’t leave.
Wendy does.
Peter has achieved what childhood nostalgia seems to desire: he does not grow up.
Neverland remains available to him.
Adventure continues.
There will always be pirates and mermaids and battles and flights across the night sky.
And yet Peter’s great triumph over time is also his tragedy.
Wendy grows.
Peter doesn’t.
She becomes an adult. Time carries her forward. Eventually another child stands where Wendy once stood.
Peter remains Peter.
At first that sounds wonderful.
Then it begins to sound terribly lonely.
Barrie complicates the easy assumption that the tragedy of childhood is that it ends.
Would we actually want it not to?
Would we really want Christopher Robin to remain forever in the Hundred Acre Wood?
Would we want Calvin to be six years old for eternity?
Would we want childhood to become a room whose door could never be opened from the inside?
Growing up is not a catastrophe.
It is what children are supposed to do.
Wendy must leave Neverland.
Christopher Robin must leave the Forest.
Something good is being surrendered, certainly.
But it is surrendered because another good is beginning.
The sadness does not come from adulthood defeating childhood.
It comes from discovering that life sometimes asks us to leave one beautiful thing precisely because there are other beautiful things ahead.
Alice finds an even simpler way out of Wonderland.
She wakes up.
It was a dream.
Or something sufficiently like a dream that the distinction hardly matters.
But Lewis Carroll does not simply end Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with Alice waking beside her sister and discovering that rabbits do not, in fact, ordinarily wear waistcoats.
Alice runs off.
Her sister remains.
And she imagines the strange world Alice has described—the White Rabbit, the tea party, the Queen, the whole impossible procession.
Then she imagines Alice herself someday grown.
That matters.
Because the adult Alice she imagines is not someone who has conquered Wonderland by becoming sensible.
Something of the child remains.
And perhaps this is what the enchanted country was for.
Maybe its purpose was never to keep us from adulthood.
Maybe it was supposed to send something home with us.
Wonder.
Imagination.
Kindness.
Humor.
The ability to recognize absurdity when it marches into the room wearing an impressive hat and demanding to be taken seriously.
Perhaps the important question is not:
Can I go back?
Perhaps it is:
What did I bring back with me?
That question belongs just as naturally to Middle-earth as it does to Wonderland.
At the end of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has every opportunity to finish magnificently.
There has been a Dark Lord.
There have been armies.
Kings.
Elves.
Eagles.
A volcano.
A ring containing enough evil to occupy three very large books.
Surely the ending deserves trumpets.
Instead, after everything else has happened, Sam goes home.
Frodo cannot.
That distinction is essential.
Frodo has been wounded too deeply by the journey. Saving the Shire does not mean he can simply return to the person he was before leaving it.
He sails from the Grey Havens.
Sam remains.
He returns to Rosie and their child.
And the enormous epic finally comes to rest in ordinary domestic life.
Sam comes home.
That is the destination.
Not a throne.
Not immortality.
Home.
There is something profoundly moving in Tolkien’s refusal to treat ordinary life as the disappointing part that happens after the adventure.
The adventure was undertaken so that ordinary life could continue.
Fields could be cultivated.
Children could be born.
Meals could be eaten.
Gardens could grow.
Doors could be opened at the end of the day.
Christopher Robin leaves the enchanted country to enter ordinary life.
Sam returns from the enchanted country to ordinary life.
Neither movement diminishes the ordinary.
Quite the opposite.
The enchanted country has taught us how precious the ordinary country is.
Maybe that is something childhood stories know before we do.
And then there is Narnia.
C. S. Lewis knew all about closing doors.
The wardrobe opens.
And then it closes.
A train platform becomes a gateway.
And then it becomes a railway platform again.
Children become kings and queens, live lifetimes in Narnia, and then tumble back into England as children once more.
Again and again, Narnia is found.
Again and again, Narnia is lost.
Eventually the children learn something particularly painful: they may become too old to return in the way they once did.
That sounds very much like Christopher Robin and Pooh.
There comes a time when the door into childhood will no longer open.
Except Lewis is not finished.
In The Last Battle, he turns the entire idea inside out.
What seemed to have been the real Narnia—the country everyone feared losing—turns out not to have been the final country at all.
The movement is not backward.
It is deeper.
Higher.
Further up and further in.
And suddenly the longing beneath all these stories looks different.
Perhaps our desire for the enchanted country is not merely nostalgia.
Perhaps beauty is not playing a cruel trick on us because we cannot keep it.
Perhaps the things we love are not valuable despite their passing.
Perhaps they are signs.
A forest.
A riverbank.
A snowy hill.
A wardrobe.
A hobbit hole.
A little yellow bird perched beside a dog on a red doghouse.
None of these things proves anything.
That is important.
Milne was Milne. Schulz was Schulz. Grahame, Barrie, Carroll, Watterson, Tolkien and Lewis were not secretly collaborating on a single philosophy of enchanted countries.
We should not force them to.
But when we place these stories beside one another, something begins to shimmer between them.
They describe a longing we recognize.
We encounter something beautiful.
We inhabit it for a while.
We cannot keep it.
And yet somehow we cannot believe that having loved it was meaningless.
Lewis gives that longing an explicitly Christian direction.
The answer is not to retreat.
Not backward into childhood.
Not backward into the nursery.
Not backward through the wardrobe.
Forward.
Further up.
Further in.
Perhaps the enchanted places were never destinations.
Perhaps they were lessons in recognition.
Why, then, does an adult still care about Winnie-the-Pooh?
Why can a comic strip about a boy and a stuffed tiger produce an unexpected lump in the throat decades after we supposedly outgrew it?
Why did Schulz’s farewell feel to so many people less like the cancellation of a newspaper feature than the death of someone they knew?
Maybe because we did know them.
Not literally.
Something stranger than that.
We inhabited their worlds.
The Hundred Acre Wood has geography.
So does the Shire.
So does the Riverbank.
So does Charlie Brown’s neighborhood.
We know where Snoopy belongs.
We know what Charlie Brown’s baseball field feels like even if Schulz never supplied us with an ordinance survey.
We know that Lucy’s psychiatric booth belongs somewhere nearby.
We know that Linus will be in the pumpkin patch when the moon rises on Halloween.
These fictional places settle into memory beside real ones.
A grandparent’s kitchen.
The elementary-school playground.
The house we lived in when we were nine.
The route we rode our bicycle.
The bedroom where someone first read Winnie-the-Pooh aloud.
Years later, the boundaries become surprisingly porous.
We can remember Pooh Corner almost as we remember places where we actually stood.
Perhaps that is because stories are among the places where childhood happens.
And that explains the strange experience of returning to them.
Rereading is never really returning.
Because we have changed.
Pooh hasn’t.
Snoopy hasn’t.
Mole End hasn’t.
Peter certainly hasn’t.
Hobbes is still beside Calvin.
We open the book expecting to find an old friend.
And we do.
The unsettling discovery is that the old friend has been waiting in exactly the same place while we have become someone else.
That can hurt.
But perhaps it is also a gift.
There are not many places in life where we can meet our younger selves.
Stories are one of them.
Which brings us back to that Sunday morning in February.
Snoopy.
Doghouse.
Typewriter.
The image is almost absurdly simple.
And perhaps that is why it works.
Now put another image beside it.
Christopher Robin and Pooh walking together toward the Enchanted Place.
Then another.
Calvin and Hobbes disappearing into a world covered with new snow.
Mole sitting before the fire in his little home.
Sam returning through his own door.
A wardrobe closing.
Don’t ask what happened next.
Perhaps one of the great acts of mercy a storyteller can perform is knowing when not to tell us.
Do not show us Pooh growing old.
Please do not give us Charlie Brown at seventy.
Do not tell us whether Calvin eventually went to university, got a job, paid taxes and one afternoon discovered Hobbes in a box in his parents’ attic.
We don’t need to know.
Leave them where they are most completely themselves.
Because we already know what happens next.
We grow up.
They don’t.
And perhaps that is not quite the tragedy we once thought it was.
Perhaps these enchanted countries were never asking us to remain children forever.
Perhaps they were teaching us something while we were children that we would need when we became adults.
How to wonder.
How to imagine.
How to laugh at pomposity.
How to come home.
How to recognize friendship.
How to recognize beauty.
How to recognize the strange ache that comes when something beautiful cannot be kept.
Perhaps they were teaching us the shape of a longing before we knew its name.
And perhaps that is why, after all these years, the old places can still call to us.
Somewhere in an enchanted place at the top of the Forest, a little boy is still playing with his Bear.
Somewhere a beagle is still sitting on top of a doghouse trying to write the great American novel.
Somewhere two friends have just discovered that overnight the whole world has been covered in fresh snow.
The page ends.
The Forest doesn’t.
We leave them there.