I always believed in the child's brilliant intuition. Its imagination has a unique poetic power, a poetic surrealism that leaves you speechless. You just have to bend over to listen to the way it thinks, the magic way it perceives or mythicizes life. And me, after writing so many historical and fictional books of metaphysical agony, I felt the need now, at this age and under these conditions in my life, to enter into the absolute freedom of magic - that which only the writing of a fairy tale, or reading it gives you - to exorcise the evil witches and the darkness they drag with them, to exorcise them with the power of innocence, this absolute magic power of imagination.
Because a child's imagination is often stronger than reality. And if we go further, only imagination has as much of the essence and extent of the eternal, as Jung described: "Only childhood can hold the eternal". And then, I think, in all the large ones - large in volume - but also in my small novels, in everything I wrote, there are children. There are endless references to my fictional characters in their childhood. Because I have always believed that childhood is the only magical place that has dominated with such enormous power in our lives. And even if we have often forgotten the incidents that made it magical. Even if we have forgotten our own childhood. It remembers us. And even if only a fragment of memory emerges from the past it's enough to overturn or capture situations.
The children's books I wrote are the fairytales I used to tell my son when he was young. I wanted him to understand, to the extent of his perception, what is precious and what is not. How essential is for children to contribute so that the "precious" is not lost. Heraclitus said, "Eternity is a child playing with game pieces". And we could say that, at all ages, we are children and playing with fear. With a tremendous collective or personal fear. And when we feel the need to write or read a children's book it is perhaps to heal the wounds of maturity.
Έγραψα για τα παιδικά μου βιβλία:
Τα παιδικά μου βιβλία, με αφορμή την έκδοση “Ο Ορφέας στο μαγεμένο δάσος”, 2021