*
Growing up is a lot like training to be a magician: you have to learn your tricks. Take shadows, for example. I used to be sure that the shifting shadows on my walls were unearthly creatures: they had crooked limbs (too many of them) and sharp talons, and they only moved when I wasn’t watching them. Night after night I observed them. Night after night I tried to make sense of them. Until, at last, I came to realize that those ever-changing monsters were an illusion caused by light from the street and the clothes I would always put in a piled-up heap on the floor. It was a reassuring find, but also more than a little disappointing. Because if there were no monsters lurking in the darkness, that meant there were no heroes to fight them. The price of a world with no demons is a world with no angels.
And this is the reality of the world we live in. In time, we learn that the only monsters are human ones, and that the people who seemed to be heroes are just people we didn’t know well enough. We learn the tricks of life, we practise them tirelessly, and come to believe that we have little left to wonder at. By the time we know enough to be able to function as a grown-up, words like jaded and world-weary apply to us. Disenchantment coils its tentacles around our throat, and we only notice them when we are halfway to being strangled.
Of course, we know we will never get to a point where we understand all the tricks that make the world function. But we understand so many of them that we can confidently say that there is always a trick at play, even when we can’t pin down its exact nature. You might not be able to describe how data reaches your tablet, but you know that the powers that make it happen are not at all mysterious. You might not be able to explain the mechanics of a solar eclipse, but you know that it does not involve dragons eating up the sun. And you might already be fondling your phone, eager to check Wikipedia the moment this paragraph ends. We live in a world where good, solid, reliable information is never more than a few taps away.
Or a few discoveries away. There are still plenty of unexplained phenomena in our old universe, things that even Nobel prize-winning scientists don’t understand yet. But what we don’t know, as a species, we shall learn. Again, the one fundamentally important thing we do know, you and I and everybody else, is that there is always a trick at play. Moonlight might inspire poets, but when all is said and done it is nothing more than the reflected light of the sun. The moon? A barren grey rock in the sky, as bewitching, in and of itself, as a paperweight.
This kind of thinking led the sociologist Max Weber to say that society has been through a process of disenchantment,2 brought about by modern science and rationality. We became too clever to believe in fairy tales. Society as a whole stopped believing in mystery in the same way we, as individuals, stopped believing in Father Christmas. With the same rewards, and also paying the same price.
As a society, we know that we can calculate our way out of our troubles; if not today, then tomorrow. It seems that we have no use for gods, spirits and miracles any more. Once upon a time, adults and children alike cultivated an enchanted view of apparently unexplainable phenomena, but the unexplainable has ceased to exist. All that we are left with is the unexplained, and we know perfectly well how we are going to explain it: through science. We might get something wrong along the way, but science is beautifully willing to correct itself. The method as a whole never fails.
And yet.
Imagine you are walking through a street market. At one of the stalls, a young woman with pinched cheeks and a runny nose is showing a magic trick to a bunch of teenagers herded by a weary-looking teacher. You know perfectly well what is happening: an underpaid performer is bamboozling tourists into buying cheap gadgets. But all the same, you stop in your tracks. You forget the freezing wind, your ridiculously busy day, your in-laws coming for lunch next Sunday. You forget all of that when the woman guesses the name of one of her punters, a French student she couldn’t possibly have met before. You gape at her, and your lips move in spite of yourself, and before you know it you find yourself smiling, and then clapping her, just a bit.
The young woman is a magician. Her day job is to inspire a sense of wonder. All of the other people we are going to meet on the road – occultists and scientists, fairy experts and storytellers – do wondrous things, but inspiring wonder is explicitly a magician’s job.
Sure, seeing someone change an Ace of Spades into a Ten of Hearts is not necessarily a wonderful experience, and you don’t stare in awe every time a trickster joins two rings of apparently solid steel, but, on a good day, when the magician knows what she is doing, and you are in the right frame of mind, something happens, the wires touch, and a spark hits you. Whether the trick is carried out by a celebrated illusionist or a nameless street magician, or by a drunk friend who knows only one trick but delivers it with seamless grace, it comes like a bolt from the blue, and when it does, it makes you feel unmoored, slightly dizzy. You forget for the briefest moment that it is an illusion after all.
Immediately, common sense takes the reins again: there is always a trick! What the magician did is unexplained, yes, but far from unexplainable. And indeed, your mind is already busily trying to work out the trick. Yet for a brief moment before that, you had the experience of a bona fide miracle. Magic pulled you into another world, an enchanted one, where prodigies happen at market stalls.
So, how can we bottle that?
*
‘Sometimes,’ says a man with a white beard and a polished accent, ‘things that seem simple aren’t so simple after all.’ He sits in a dark, but not too dark, room. There is a thin candle on the table in front of him, and he holds in his hands a length of string. He starts talking about how life can be great, but also difficult, and every time he mentions trouble, he passes the piece of string through the flame, until all he is left with is a small handful of charred threads. ‘The bonds between us,’ the man sighs, shaking the burned threads in his clasped hands, ‘seem broken for ever.’ Then he makes a tiny ball of the blackened remains of the string. ‘We hope that’s not so,’ he says. ‘We want something more. The universal dream is a dream of magic… and transformation.’ Widening his lips in a Cheshire cat grin, he uses two hands to unravel the ball, revealing a single thread, perfectly whole again.
This extraordinary performance, less than two minutes long on my laptop’s screen, leaves me elated. It shuts down my rational inner chattering for the time it lasts. I don’t care how the man in the video managed to restore the wholeness of the string. I only wish he could do the same to our divided, bitter society – and, if I am honest, to my divided, bitter self.
But I am supposed to be carrying out research. Magicians have their jargon: technically a ‘trick’ is made of two parts, an ‘effect’ and a ‘method’. What we see (a rabbit coming out of a top hat) is the ‘effect’; the way they accomplish it (which I won’t reveal here, sorry) is the ‘method’. I search online for an explanation of the method, which takes me all of fifty seconds to find, and yes, it is as trivial as you would expect. Fortified with my adult understanding of how things are done, I go back to the bearded man’s performance.
I make a point of looking for the method at work, and I manage, but just for a few seconds. Then I forget. The magician’s voice lulls me into a daze again, and my rational faculties, again, shut down. His magic is not literally real, nor does he pretend otherwise, but I believe in it all the same. It is not that I want to. It is more that his magic just is, it exists, regardless of what I believe, or want to believe. The effect is much more powerful than the method, and the result is impressive enough to make me stop thinking about its petty mechanics.