Moomin

I recently read a kiddie-lit story called “The Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters”. It’s a Moomin story written by Tove Jansson . We discovered the Moomins on our trip to Sweden and Finland last month and I’m completely, utterly in love with the whole Moomin mythology. It is ostensibly kid-lit like I said but there’s an underlying sensibility to the stories that’s pretty grown-up. Like, oh, say, the vintage Warner Brothers cartoons you can enjoy the stories on different levels; on the one hand they’re basic, enjoyable silly kid stories with a slightly dark edge but on the other hand they can be read as allegories about people’s possessiveness or interaction with nature or friendship or about trying to live life with a sense of curiosity and wonder taking joy in the simple things that are often overlooked. They are often just an elegant expression of the old “stop and smell the flowers” cliché.

Discovering the Moomin mythology has also given me a kind of cultural pride for probably the first time in my life. A lot of the stories have a feel and a sensibility that I’ve had for a long time without being able to identify its source. I never really felt the kind of proud ethnic identity that say, the Italian kids or the Jewish kids or the Irish kids I grew up with felt. Being kind of a mutt (or a true American) on my father’s side of the family and claiming ancestry from places most of my peers couldn’t find on a map on my mother’s side didn’t exactly lend itself to that kind of thing. I’ve spent my life just sort of drifting along without a flag decal to paste on the back of my car. The positive piece of that is that I tend to not judge the quality of people based on their bloodlines; rather I pretty much have an equally low opinion of everyone regardless of their origin.

So this Fillyjonk (spoilers ahoy) has this collection of wonderful tea cups and other junk in her rented summer home by the sea and spends all her time fearing for the disaster that will destroy it all. Long story short, she winds up being right. The climax of the story is transcribed here.

Now I’m sure some people will interpret that story as being some sort of anti-capitalist rant. Although we are once again at a point in history where “the market” has vaporized large chunks of working people’s life savings which makes an anti-capitalist rant completely appropriate, I don’t see the Fillyjonk’s story that way at all. I see it as a story about a person who, once freed of the crap accumulated through a lifetime of acquisitiveness became a simpler, freer, happier person. It could even be an analogy for ending a bad relationship. However you choose to interpret it, it’s evocative and beautiful. It taps into the human desire for rebirth and reinvention, that universal (except for the narcissist crowd) need for reinvention or reincarnation that has inspired art and launched religion for millennia.

Not bad for a kiddie story.