Are you feeling liminal?

(Photo taken at Woolwich Dam and Reservoir, September 2024)

by Anne White

In the bleakness of January 2021 (when it felt like Christmas had taken a Narnia-like pass and the winter would go on imprisoning us forever), Amber Sparks wrote a piece for ElectricLiterature.com, called "I Just Want to Hang Out in the Wardrobe." 

Well, who wouldn't? But Sparks (chafing in that pandemic limbo) says her craving isn't for full-on Narnia; she writes, "I’ve been wishing instead to stop at the threshold, to open the door of the spare room and crawl into that wardrobe and not come out again." She goes on to talk about the particular attraction of "liminal spaces" in literature--the thresholds, vestibules, hallways, or phantom tollbooths that lead us to--well, somewhere else. That cinematic moment when Dorothy pauses with her hand on the doorknob; or, in The Secret Garden, Mary finding the locked door in the wall. Sparks doesn't specifically mention C. S. Lewis's "Wood Between the Worlds," but that would also fall into the "liminal" category: not a world in itself, but a place containing the doorways to all the other worlds. 

She warns that those of us over a certain age may never be able to return fully to the fantasy worlds that not only enriched our childhoods, but that, often, helped us survive them. As a child, she dreamed of finding "a place where a kind of low, slow magic still exists, where gym class doesn’t, where underdogs are issued powerful weapons and magical powers"; and books became those magical spaces for her. And for a time so long that we think it won't end, we keep returning, until one day, like Alice in Wonderland, we find we can no longer fit through the doorway.

"At 42, let’s be real, I can’t imagine a talking animal giving me a magic talisman without snickering a little. The first time I thought about how the Pevensie children’s mother must have broken her heart with worry when she sent them to the country, I think I wept a little to be so grown up at last."

But there is still a memory of that enchantment that we allow ourselves, or perhaps there is a new one that (as Sparks says) we don't fully experience until we have slowed down enough to appreciate those thresholds for themselves. 

"Waiting is, in fact, a repellent concept for most children, eager to be in action, eager for answers."

It might be similar to discovering a peculiar enjoyment of airports and train stations; or even of the journey itself, rattling down tracks past the backsides of towns, or suspended in that unlike-anything-else time of flight, before we get to our real destination. T. S. Eliot wrote about exactly that sense in "The Dry Salvages" (part of the Four Quartets):

When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus...

Some of you reading this may still be able to fit yourselves fully through the doorways of enchantment; to get off the train and know you have arrived. Others, like the camel in Nick Butterworth's The Little Gate, may find they have to kneel down or unload a few things first. And then there are those of us whose knees are getting a bit stiff to go through fairy doorways. What then shall we do? Just wait outside?

Sparks finds that writing itself "is a kind of liminal space, with all the possibilities of wonder and none of the risk. We can’t get back to Neverland once we are grown, but we can write a path through the midnight sky." In other words, there is a sense that our creativity can open those worlds for others. And perhaps those of us who don't write (or paint or compose or sculpt or weave), but do read, and particularly those of us who read to others (older or younger), can do the same. This also applies to those who teach Sunday school, lead nature walks, or explore mathematics joyfully. 

And for ourselves? Even if we cannot force our way in, Sparks says, we may still find that "liminal spaces have a regenerative power of their own...Perhaps we liminal adults can feel we, too, belong, that the world is almost a good place for us, too, if we can remake it in these spaces." These outside places, these doorsteps and waiting spaces, also have things to teach us.

As Sparks says, liminal spaces can still offer wonder, without the risk. Maybe there is a new kind of adventure for us right there in the woods, even when the magic rings are lost.