Overall Favorite Books of 2016
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16.
PINOCCHIO
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“Myths are made for the imagination to
breathe life into them,” Albert Camus wrote. Ada Lovelace, the world’s first
computer programmer, observed a century earlier as she
contemplated the nature
of the imagination and its three core faculties: “Imagination is the Discovering Faculty,
pre-eminently… that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us.”
This “discovering faculty” of the
imagination, which breathes life into both the most captivating myths and the
deepest layers of reality, is what animated Italian artist Alessandro
Sanna one winter afternoon when he glimpsed a most unusual tree branch
from the window of a moving train — a branch that looked like a sensitive human
silhouette, mid-fall or mid-embrace.
As Sanna cradled the enchanting image in his
mind and began sketching it, he realized that something about the “body
language” of the branch reminded him of a small, delicate, terminally ill child
he’d gotten to know during his visits to Turin’s Pediatric Hospital. In
beholding this common ground of tender fragility, Sanna’s imagination leapt to
a foundational myth of his nation’s storytelling — the Pinocchio story.
In the astonishingly beautiful and
tenderhearted Pinocchio:
The Origin Story , also among the year’s loveliest
picture-books, Sanna imagines an alternative prequel to
the beloved story, a wordless genesis myth of the wood that became Pinocchio,
radiating a larger cosmogony of life, death, and the transcendent continuity
between the two.
A fitting follow-up to The
River — Sanna’s exquisite visual memoir of
life on the Po River in Northern Italy, reflecting on the seasonality of human
existence — this imaginative masterwork dances with the cosmic unknowns that
eclipse human life and the human mind with their enormity: questions like what
life is, how it began, and what happens when it ends.
Origin myths have been our oldest sensemaking
mechanism for wresting meaning out of these as-yet-unanswered, perhaps unanswerable questions. But rather than an argument with science
and our secular sensibility, Sanna’s lyrical celebration of myth embodies
Margaret Mead’s insistence on the
importance of poetic truth in the age of facts.
The tree is an organic choice for this
unusual cosmogony — after all, trees have inspired centuries
of folk tales around the world; a
17th-century English gardener marveled at how they “speak
to the mind, and tell us many things, and teach us many good lessons” and Hermann Hesse called them “the
most penetrating of preachers.”
It is both a pity and a strange comfort that
Sanna’s luminous, buoyant watercolors and his masterful subtlety of scale don’t
fully translate onto this screen — his analog and deeply humane art is of a
different order, almost of a different time, and yet woven of the timeless and
the eternal.
BRAIN PICKINGS
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