During my year-long stint as a book-slinger at my local Barnes & Noble, I spent most of my time learning the machinations of the children’s book department. Through the months, I found myself becoming way too knowledgeable of children’s literature for someone of my age at that time. I wasn’t always familiar with the contents of the books, but I grew to love the illustrations and those wizards of various mediums who created them. In the midst of stocking books, I would occasionally read one and appreciate the joyful interplay of text and pictures.
And then there were others that had reputations that far exceeded any general knowledge of children’s literature. These were often considered classics. They also happened to be those I stocked without a second thought. These were known to me on some ambient level. They were known by most of us on that level. Whether I had them read to me or I had read them myself did not really matter as I vaguely knew what it was about. These books never piqued my interest during my time making slightly-above minimum wage. I can’t tell you how many times and how many copies of Margaret Wise Brown’s and Clement Hurd’s Goodnight Moon I had to replace on those beige, offensively inoffensive metal shelves on a weekly basis. One some level, I knew the book enough to not ever need to actually know it.
Fast-forward seven or eight years to the birth of my first son. I don’t recall if we bought a copy or were given it at a baby shower, but Goodnight Moon ended up on the book shelf in my son’s nursery. The first time I read it to him is not as memorable to me as the feelings that welled up for me. I am not convinced that I would have felt these visceral emotions and stirrings if I had read it divorced from the context of reading it to my son. This is largely due to the book’s mystical spell or “an incantation” which captures the attention of anyone who mutters its words aloud to another.
In an essay she wrote in honor of Zena Sutherland, the author Susan Coopernames Goodnight Moon as an example of “escaping ourselves.” She states,
No realistic story has yet attained the universal affection they give to fairy-tale, except possibly, in the United States, Goodnight Moon — which is not a story at all, but a deceptively simple ritual.
The ritual of the book comes from sounding out the simple rhymes and the visual cues alternating between colored spreads and sparse, black-and-white illustrations (which were normal at the time as a cost-saving tactic). This along with the almost hypnotic rhyming and repetition that lulls as much as it surprises is what makes the book continual bestseller. Brown was mentored by Lucy Sprague Mitchell after enrolling in the Bureau of Educational Experiments’ Cooperative School for Student Teachers in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. It was Mitchell who held to a relatively new psychology towards children.
[Mitchell] believed that preschoolers were primarily interested in their own small worlds, and that fantasy actually confused and alienated them. “It is only the blind eye of the adult that finds the familiar uninteresting,” Mitchell wrote. “The attempt to amuse children by presenting them with the strange, the bizarre, the unreal, is the unhappy result of this adult blindness.”
It was Brown’s re-connection with her childhood that allowed her to write through the eyes of a child. Goodnight Moon even conjured a bedtime routine she and her sister used to do when they were kids. One writer recounted how she hardly remembers the end of the book because most of the time when her parents read it to her, she would fall asleep before the end. I never had the childhood routine of Brown and her sister and I don’t have strong recollections of having it read to me by my parents. The closest way I could elucidate the feeling I have while reading Goodnight Moon is liturgy. A deep, lovely and intimate liturgy between parent and child.
The story echoes Brown’s experience through a young rabbit’s nighttime routine of saying goodnight to the various things he sees and hears while his mother/grandmother sits in a rocking chair knitting, but it is clear that the things the young rabbit is saying goodnight to transcend the materiality of this world. At one point, the young rabbit says goodnight to the “cow jumping over the moon” that had only prior been named as simply a picture in the great, green room of the book. Yet to the world of the young rabbit, this reality was more than socks and mittens and little toy houses, it encompasses the imaginative power of story, fable, fairytale, and folklore.
The transcendent and mundane coexist during the few minutes our story takes place.
Yet, like liturgy, there are moments in which I am prone to feel something other than joy and wonder. Early in the book, Brown has the young rabbit say goodnight to a comb, a brush, a bowl full of mush, and a quiet old lady who was whispering “hush.” This pattern returns a little later on, yet there is an addition within it that is unexpected and, honestly, a little unnerving. The young rabbit once again says goodnight to the comb and the brush in a spread of bright primary colors and then the reader turns the page and sees a blank, white page that simply says “Goodnight nobody” which leads to the following black and white illustration of a bowl full of mush followed by another colored spread of a woman saying hush.
“Goodnight nobody.”
I still don’t know what to make of it. It is as stunning as it is disquieting. I love it as much as I fear it every time I reach that part of the liturgy, reminiscent of the psalms that are salted throughout the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer. They are not always pleasant. They speak of the inner depths of our humanity and the violence that has been seeded in the soil of our being since Cain. We do best to read the difficult prayers of the psalms through the lens of the people throughout history (or perhaps simply next door to us) that pray these disquieting things to God. Someone did. Someone is. Just as someone has uttered a goodnight to “nobody” or perhaps the more existential night of the soul that writers like Walker Percy describe.
I get goosebumps when I read “goodnight nobody” out loud to my son, because it feels too remarkably human. It’s playful in the mouth of a young rabbit who may not know the toils and trials of this world yet, but it sears the hearts of those on the other side of that dark, dark night.
This is what liturgy can do so well, taking the elements of dark and light and mingling them together into a portrait that is equal parts joy and holy terror. It calls to the redeemed parts of us as well as the fatal wounds that still bleed out onto the dust of this planet. Goodnight Moon accomplishes similar mystical rituals for a child who sees the sharp, brilliant colors of a world unknown and unexplored and for their world-weary parent whose color palette has become more monochrome. Yet the liturgy is what brings these two perspectives together into a rhythm of love and devotion.
Unlike most prayers, liturgy requires it being read aloud, with other people. Like the sacred liturgies of the church, Goodnight Moon needs to be expelled into the air with our breath and vocal chords just as a nighttime prayer shared between, in my case, a father and a son.
It is fitting then that the final pages of the book end with a darkened color spread of the great, green room with red text saying “Goodnight noises everywhere.” Not only does the vocal recitation end after that sentence, but the visual cue shows a type of meeting space between the bright color palette of the lively and hopeful possibilities of youth and the tempered and wary shadows of getting older. The declaration of saying goodnight in the prayer just recited is not an end, but a beginning. We are, in effect, beckoning the voice of our Maker to speak through the silence. To reconcile the bright and tepid, the hope and futility, the material and the transcendent, and to bring about a new day with a new dawn and a new song.
COMMENTS
10 responses to “Goodnight Noises Everywhere”
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well, putting the kiddo to bed will certainly be quite different tonight. great article!
If I can enliven the bedtime routine for someone, then my job is finished here. Thanks for reading!
When the world needed him most, HE returned!
Truly! i feel the same way
Thank you for sharing this perspective on a favorite book. Finding liturgy everywhere is a beautiful to experience life.
I am glad you enjoyed it. Thank you for reading!
I really enjoyed your article. It made me recall treasured memories of reading it to my children and to my grandchildren. My daughter always enjoyed searching for the little mouse.
Thank you for this. It is one of my daughter’s favourite books. She loves to turn the pages slowly with a lengthy pause inbetween each page to study the room, prayer seems to get so squashed out of life as a parent to young kids that anything like this book offers the same kind of moments of space and grace for gratitude at the end of each day.
Good Night Moon was read nightly to our children, now 40, 37, and 33. Not sure what attracted it to our shelf… but the day ended predictably and peacefully. One evening, we arrived in the ER post ambulance ride from a car accident…These predictable words brought comfort as I recited them over my daughters in their pain and fear…God’s grace was there.
Well, Good Night Moon is no horror movie, but what the heart wants, the will chooses, and the mind justifies, so I suppose we will just have to accept that.
Nice job, Blake. I am glad you are experiencing the joy of fatherhood.