What If: A French Illustrated Celebration of a More Possible World for the Children of Tomorrow
By Maria Popova
“The present is not a potential past; it is the moment of choice and action,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote. At bottom, choice and action always begin with “what if” — the mightiest spring for the utopian imagination, the fulcrum by which every revolution rolls into being. What if this world were freer, more beautiful, more just? “We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in weighing the transformative power of the speculative imagination. “We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.”
That chance to imagine a better world is what French author Thierry Lenain and artist Olivier Tallec invite in What If… (public library), translated by Enchanted Lion founder Claudia Bedrick — a lovely celebration of our civilizational responsibility, in the beautiful words of the cellist Pablo Casals, “to make this world worthy of its children” and a testament to James Baldwin’s sobering insistence that “we made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.”
Although we don’t yet know it, the story begins with an unborn child imagining himself into being as he imagines a better version of the world to be born into. Where he sees war, he imagines turning the soldiers’ rifles into perches for bird and flutes for shepherds. Where he sees drought and famine, he imagines pulling rainclouds over the desert like enormous kites.
He places his child-body between the “gorging, ordering, shouting, and decreeing” orange-haired politician on the TV screen and the people mesmerized before it. He sits on the ocean shore and imagines it clean of human-inflicted pollution, buoying colorful fish.
He falls asleep on a mossy patch in the forest, listening to the wisdom of the trees. He sees heartache and tears, and imagines them salved by love.
“We have to hug,” he decided, “and not be afraid of kisses. What if we start saying ‘I love you,’ even if we’ve never heard it before?”
And looking out into this world, so imperfect yet so improvable, the child decides, in the final spread of the book, to be born.
The simple yet profound narrative and Tallec’s soulful, tender illustrations make What If… the young imagination’s counterpart to Albert Camus’s famous assertion that “judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Complement it with James Baldwin on the building blocks of a juster future, then revisit other poetic and profound treasures from artist and writers around the world, brought to English-speaking children ages 1 to 100 by the imaginative Enchanted Lion Books: Cry, Heart, But Never Break, Big Wolf & Little Wolf, The Lion and the Bird, Bertolt, and This Is a Poem That Heals Fish, also illustrated by Tallec.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova
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Published July 29, 2019
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https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/07/29/what-if-tallec-lenain/
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