“What are we, anyway, at our best, but one small, persistent cluster in a greater ferment of human activity — still and forever turning toward, tuned for, the possible,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her classic Arts of the Possible while the field of counterfactuals was emerging in theoretical physics as the science of the possible. Everything that is possible is in some sense real, because behind every “what if” is the “if/then” of a causality tethered back to the first thing that ever happened — the inception of this particular universe with its particular set of permissions — and dominoing forward to what has not yet happened but is happenable in this very universe. Hope is the potential energy of reality. But it takes trust in the possible to release it. Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.Alongside physics and poetry, fairy tales may be our best instrument for discerning the axioms of reality and building from them scale models of possibility. (“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”)In her revelatory reckoning with how fairy tales reveal us to ourselves, found in her posthumous essay collection The Unforgivable (public library), Italian writer Cristina Campo (April 29, 1923–January 10, 1977) examines the relationship between the hope and trust, and the dangers of confusing them, in our quest for the possible. She writes:The impossible awaits the hero of a fairy tale. But how is a person to reach the impossible if not, precisely, by means of the impossible?[…]The fairy-tale hero… must forget all his* limits when he contends with the impossible and pay constant attention to these limits when he performs the impossible.Art by Stanislav Kolíbal from The Fairy Tale TreeThe great appeal of the fairy tale and its ultimate payoff, Campo argues, is “victory over the law of necessity, the constant transition to a new order of relationships” — that is, a new organizing principle that is not deterministic but possibilistic. “I said to my soul,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.” Addressing the soul of the person who wishes to be the hero of their own fate — that is, to refuse to be a victim of the myth of the impossible — Campo writes:Whom does a marvelous fate befall in fairy tales? He who trusts hopelessly in what is beyond hope. Hope and trust must not be confused. They are different things, as the expectation of fortune here on earth is different from the second theological virtue. He who blindly, obstinately repeats “let us hope” does not trust; he is really only hoping for a lucky break in the momentarily propitious game governed by the law of necessity. Those who trust, on the other hand, do not count on particular events, for they are sure there is an economy that encompasses all events and surpasses their meaning the way a tapestry, a symbolic carpet, surpasses the flowers and animals that compose it.Century-old art by the adolescent Virginia Frances Sterrett. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)The great paradox of real life — this social contract so trammeled by permissions as to be blind to possibilities — is that those who see the tapestry are often seen as mad. (This, of course, has always been the case — take Kepler, take Blake, take Dickinson.) An epoch after G.K. Chesterton contemplated how we stay sane in a mad world and offered his insightful taxonomy of life as a poem, a novel, or a fairy tale, Campo writes:In the fairy tale, the victor is the madman who reasons backward, who reverses the masks, who discerns the secret thread in the fabric, the inexplicable play of echoes in a melody; he who moves with ecstatic precision in the labyrinth of formulas, numbers, antiphons, and rituals common to the Gospels, fairy tales, and poetry. He believes, like the saint, that a person can walk on water, that a fervent spirit can leap over walls. He believes, like the poet, in the word, from which he can conjure concrete wonders.Couple with Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on fairy tales and the necessity of fear, then revisit John Steinbeck on the true meaning and purpose of hope and J.R.R. Tolkien on fairy tales and the psychology of fantasy.donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.