"I would describe myself as nicely dressed, and pretty evil."
I'm not sure I've written anything that wasn't a little like The Phantom Tollbooth. When I wasn't moving sand from one side to the other with tweezers. In the best way though, The Phantom Tollbooth was a little like a lot of things worth copying, so maybe I copied copying from it too. Milo was a child's Danté, lost in the forest of his life at the prodigious age of ten. Like Wonderland, the world he found on the other side of the Tollbooth was packed with unapologetically academic silliness and momentous thought experiments. And like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz – and I suppose Everyman from Everyman ("Everymun"?) – his way through that world was a handy quest. This Christmas just gone, my sister gave me a beautiful annotated edition of it.
So thanks, Norton Juster, for writing The Phantom Tollbooth, and teaching me the names of some of the demons, and I'm sorry you're gone.
The story about the town that disappeared because everyone walked around looking down at their feet has always stuck with me. The whole book is full of wisdom, boiled down to child-size sweets, but that one in particular has haunted me, and I think of if often when trying to find someone to sketch who isn't looking at their phone.
ReplyDeleteWhen I heard Norman Juster had died, this week, I have to confess my surprise overrode my sadness, as I had assumed he was a lot older. I realised I had no idea when Phantom Tollbooth was written, only that the film was made probably in the 1970s (a guess based on the style), so it had to have been before that, and ... just how old was he when he wrote it? It feels like it ought to be the accumulated and distilled wisdom of someone who had seen a lot of the world, but it can't have been. All the more remarkable, for that.