In many of our classes we talk quite a bit about making bedtime the last emotional fill-up rather than the frantic end to it all that it can sometimes be. There is something about bedtime that is wrought with a kind of mad panic for both parents and child. The parents are knowing they are almost free from their perpetual duty and the children are knowing they are about to be disengaged for ten, eleven, twelve hours. One is scrambling to get away whilst the other scrambles to be close.

We feel it works out much smoother when bedtime can serve as a sort of last communion of the day – a last coming together as opposed to the frantic separation it is sometimes wont to be.

That’s how we say it. Today, our friend Liz sent us this extremely eloquent clip from writer, Daniel Pennac. He says…

“…{T}he ritual of reading every evening at the end of the bed when they were little—set time, set gestures—was like a prayer. A sudden truce after the battle of the day, a reunion lifted out of the ordinary. We savored the brief moment of silence before the storytelling began, then our voice, sounding like itself again, the liturgy of chapters. . . . Yes, reading a story every evening fulfilled the most beautiful, least selfish, and least speculative function of prayer: that of having our sins forgiven. We didn’t confess, we weren’t looking for a piece of eternity, but it was a moment of communion between us, of textual absolution, a return to the only paradise that matters: intimacy. Without realizing it, we were discovering one of the crucial functions of storytelling and, more broadly speaking, of art in general, which is to offer a respite from human struggle.” – Daniel Pennac, The Rights of the Reader

Um, yes, that’s what we were trying to say. Only this is better. Thank you Mr. Pennac.