Do you believe in magic? asked the Lovin’ Spoonful back in 1965. Two years later, the magical mystery tour was waiting to take us away. Nowadays, when many of us perhaps feel that the tour is long departed and we were left at the station, we may ask whether anyone seriously believes in magic beyond the age of about ten. Magic is associated with childhood, with childhood’s sense of possibility, the sense that the world is a wondrous place where anything can happen. When we speak of a period of time that is “magical”—like the Sixties, like the time we were romantically in love--we mean that a numinous energy animated the world and everything in it. In such a time, “God is alive, magic is afoot,” as Leonard Cohen put it, also in the Sixties.
January 7, 2022
January 7, 2022
January 7, 2022
Do you believe in magic? asked the Lovin’ Spoonful back in 1965. Two years later, the magical mystery tour was waiting to take us away. Nowadays, when many of us perhaps feel that the tour is long departed and we were left at the station, we may ask whether anyone seriously believes in magic beyond the age of about ten. Magic is associated with childhood, with childhood’s sense of possibility, the sense that the world is a wondrous place where anything can happen. When we speak of a period of time that is “magical”—like the Sixties, like the time we were romantically in love--we mean that a numinous energy animated the world and everything in it. In such a time, “God is alive, magic is afoot,” as Leonard Cohen put it, also in the Sixties.