Fairy Tale Wisdom

In my other post of a book review, I exposed how much of a loss I undergo when finishing a book, fortunately I choose to direct these feelings into writing these couple of lines about how much I loved the book I've been reading (which I sadly ended yesterday), The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (in spanish: Psicoanálisis de los Cuentos de Hadas) written by Bruno Bettelheim. Not only is it a powerful literary acquisition, but also a useful resource when fairy tales come to mind.

Bettelheim does an amazing job explaining why is it that these magical stories help so much to the learning process a child needs to undergo throughout his/her infant years. It attacks existential questioning that the little one bears in mind but is too afraid to express, not only giving the child the confidence that the questioning is an element completely normal to exist, but also providing him/her with a handful of resourceful solutions that may help him/her get their happy ending. Fairy tales take you to other lands, where princesses must meet princes and fall deeply in love and where evil witches and step-mothers get, at the very end of the book, what they deserve.
Fairy tales speak to us in so many ways, and that's the beauty of their nature: the meaning each and every story evokes is so different from person to person and helps each one of us in different stages of our evolution as human beings. Bettelheim writes beautifully portraying the child as a person, a special value that we, adults, have forgotten they possess.
Few are those books that have so many elements that make a special click with the way you feel and think about children, and this book does exactly so, in the same nature it addresses: magically and full of fantasy and imagery. Wonderful book to read, beautiful and simple, always keeping it real.
A true gem for parents, teachers and psychologists everywhere if you ask me!

Culturally Biased

It has been a week of ups and downs.
Pros:
Getting over the two intense weeks of exams.
Catching up on Sex and The City reruns.
Succesful results in my tutoring classes.
Cons:
Lack of sleep.
Not being able to find Jane Austen books in Panama.
And, shocking but true: Lack of sleep.

Today, while coming back from my tutoring classes, I decided to stop at an undisclosed bookstore to ask if they had a book I need to read for my Industrial and Organizational Psychology class. Not only was I very excited when they told me that they did sell it, but also when I spotted a Literature section in the bookstore. Unfortunately, that excitement soon vanished when they told me they were out of stock and when I came across the fact that the only authors they had under the section previously mentioned, were limitted to Ernest Hemingway, Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Marquez. Don't get me wrong, all of those are wonderful writers but their books are all over Panama. My point is that that section had no Charles Dickens, no Virginia Woolf, no Oscar Wilde and DEFINITELY no Jane Austen. I was furious. I have been looking for Jane Austen books since I can remember, not only because I'm obsessed with Pride and Prejudice (movie) and The Jane Austen Book Club (movie), but because she seems like such a fine writer and books online just aren't enough.
How is it that in this huge, well renowned bookstore were no Jane Austen books?
How is it that they seem to get boxes and boxes about Kate Gosselin's autobiography and only one miserable copy of Sense and Sensibility?
Even more bizzare is, how is it that insead of having stocks of these historical authors they have stocks of he's-just-not-that-into-you type of books?
Though they are amusing, they just don't have that literate use of words that you could only find in magical novels that take you back to other centuries.
Quite frankly, I'm frightened. I'm scared about the kind of example we are trying to portray as a country. More importantly, as a society. Is it, then, that we have lost ourselves into ¨pop culture¨ or that the culture has been lost?

I remembered being in high school and reading about John Keats and also J.K Rowling (who is one of my favorite authors, by the way). What I'm trying to convey here is that there can be a balance between classical authors and new writers, but I feel that in Panama we always go to extremes. Another thing left to be thought of, will there come a time where Jane Austen readers and Lauren Conrad fans will be able to sit together as a big family in the great dinner table of literature in Panama? I sure hope so because if not, I'll be making Amazon very, very rich.