Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your serenity, the hammer that shatters your wholeness — to want anything is to deem your life incomplete without it. It is a perpetual motion machine that keeps you restlessly spinning around the still point of enough. “Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter a century before Kurt Vonnegut, in his shortest and most poignant poem, located the secret of happiness in the sense of enough. Wanting is a story of scarcity writing itself on the scroll of the mind, masquerading as an equation read from the blackboard of reality. That story is the history of the world. But it need not be its future, or yours.
An epoch after John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan — John Ciardi’s magnificent 1963 spell against the cult of more — author Martine Murray and artist Anna Read, living parallel lives close to nature in rural Australia, offer a mighty new counter-myth in The Wanting Monster (public library) — an almost unbearably wonderful modern fable about who we would be and what this world would be like if we finally arrived, exhausted and relieved, at the still point of enough. Having always felt that great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise, speaking great truth in the language of tenderness, I hold this one among my all-time favorites.
The story begins in a town so tranquil and content that no one notices the Wanting Monster, who stands sulking on the edge of the scene, part ghost out of a Norse myth, part Sendakian Wild Thing.
And so the Wanting Monster stomps over to the next village, “bellowing and crashing about as monsters do,” but still the magpie keeps singing, the bees keep laboring at the flowers, and the children keep playing in the square. The Wanting Monster redoubles the growling and the howling, but not even Billie Ray, “the littlest child of the village,” pays heed.
This inflict no small identity crisis:
What good was a monster if it couldn’t raise any trouble? If it couldn’t even raise the eyebrow of a small, curly-headed child? The Wanting Monster had its head in shame.
But then it comes upon Mr. Banks, napping serenely by the stream. With that “terrible compulsion” that turns the insecure monstrous, the Wanting Monster moans its siren growl of want into the sleeping man’s ear.
Mr. Banks began to wriggle. His heart began to jiggle.
A little note of misery sounded in his mind.
What could possibly be wrong?
It was a perfect day for as snooze by the stream. But now he wanted something else, something more.
Suddenly, he wants the stream itself, shimmering so seductively in the sunlight that it has to be had.
As soon as Mr. Banks builds a swimming pool at his house and fills it with the stream’s water, Mr. Bishop perches to peek over the fence and begins “to twitch and prickle and hop around” with the restless desire for a pool of his own.
So goes the cascade of envy, that handmaiden of wanting, until pool by pool the streams begins to run dry.
Soon it was only a trickle.
The fish gasped and flapped, the frogs jumped away, and the reeds withered and died.
Triumphant and drunk on its own power, the Wanting Monster now wonders how much more damage it can do to these peaceful people. So it turns to Mrs. Walton next, who is gathering flowers in the field for her dear friend Maria, and whispers into her ear.
Mrs. Walton began to frown and fret.
She was irritated. Why was she picking flowers for Maria when it was really she herself who deserved them?
She should fill her own house with flowers.
Yes, she should have the most fragrant, the most colorful, the most stylish house in the whole village.
Everyone would admire it. Everyone would envy her.
The other women watch Mrs. Walton pick all the flowers she can carry, and suddenly they too are aflame with the mania for owning the flowers. Soon, no flowers are left and the bees are bereft of pollen, the butterflies fly away, and the wrens and finches have nowhere to nest.
The Wanting Monster stomps across the flowerless fields, gloating.
That night, it visits Mr. Newton — the town’s most passionate stargazer — and whispers into Mr. Newton’s ear.
Suddenly possessed with the desire to own the stars, he heads to the forest and cuts down a great old tree to build himself a ladder, then climbs into the night and takes a star.
I am reminded here of this miniature etching by William Blake, which I suspect might have inspired Read’s art:
Ms. Grimehart watches Mr. Newton and, unable to bear possessing no stars herself, she cuts down not one tree but two to make an even bigger ladder and snatches not one star but five.
More and more ladders rise up and the sky soon grows starless. With the stream gone and the flowers gone and the forest gone, with the birds silent and the bees still, this tranquil little world finds itself unworlded.
The village was quiet and colorless and gloomy. The children wept. They had loved their forest and their little stream. They missed the singing birds, the sunlit flowers, the shining stars.
People, unable to console the children, begin to leave. The Wanting Monster roars with self-congratulation.
This time, everyone hears the roar and begins to wonder about the menacing presence. It is Billie Ray who first sees it and, pointing, tells the townsfolk that there is a monster in their midst. Naming a hurt has a way of opening up the space for healing — as soon as the little girl names the menace, everyone sees it clear as daylight. Suddenly, the Wanting Monster grows “no bigger than a beetle.” It is only those things of which we are not fully conscious that have the power to possess us.
But when the grownups lurch to stomp the tiny monster, Billie Ray stops them, leans down and asks the suddenly helpless creature if it needs a cuddle.
The Wanting Monster climbed into the palm of her hand. It was tired, after all, and the hand was soft and warm. It lay down. Billie Ray cupped her other hand to make a roof, and then she wandered toward the dry river bed, where she sat on its banks and began to rock her hand and sing the lullaby her mother had once sung to her.
No one had ever sung to the Wanting Monster before. Nor had it ever been cared for. And the Wanting Monster didn’t know quite how those things felt — not really.
Listening to the lullaby, the Wanting Monster begins to weep. “There, there,” Billie Ray comforts it, “Oh, dearest heart.” The Wanting Monster doesn’t know how to bear all this tenderness — how many of us really do — and so it goes on weeping “sorrowful, endless tears” that begin replenishing the stream.
Everyone else, listening and watching, begins to weep too.
A great mournful lament filled the valley.
Tears swelled the little stream, and it rushed like a river…
What had been withheld was released; what had dried up, flowed.
What had hardened was becoming soft again.
People unpack their suitcases, take the stars out of their pockets, and set about collecting seeds, tilling the ground, and filling watering cans to replant the trees and flowers.
As the birds return and the night reconstellates, the Wanting Monster finally stops weeping and, looking up wonder-smitten at the stars lavishing the world with all that abundant beauty, feels, finally, slaked of want.
Couple The Wanting Monster with The Fate of Fausto — Oliver Jeffers’s kindred fable inspired by Vonnegut’s poem — then revisit Wendell Berry on how to have enough.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova
