Overcoming the Nothing

Through extended analogy, we enable a discussion of The Neverending Story to also facilitate a discussion of imagination, religion, and other ethereal things in our own lives. The quest undertaken by Atreyu to restore Fantasia to its original glory is akin to our endless task of dealing with day-to-day despair through attempts to glean some meaning from our experiences, and to overcome an overwhelming sense of purposelessness. The entire world is not like us, obviously, but to treat the western individualistic perspective here would resonate with more readers, since we are all under the spell of Western intellectual tradition. The Neverending Story will show us that mystical thought and imagination are not dead or subverted by reason or objective reality, but are very much alive; they enable us to continue on our own personal quests for happiness by fostering hope and belief in luck, and helping us find meaning behind coincidence.

Coincidence itself presents no real threat to our rational belief in an objective reality, since there does not need to be a meaning behind peculiar things in order for them to affect other people and other events in a causal way. But looking to other interpretations of coincidence through the different cultural lenses of science, religion, and even magic, allows us to bring non-standard insight to the discussion. So we may ask ourselves, “What does coincidence have to do with hope and despair?” or “What do meaningful coincidences actually entail?” Holding hope in our imaginations or continuing to wish for things when we know, scientifically, that our wishes have no effect on the outcome, seems to be a childish thing to do. But that is the over arching message of The Neverending Story—children possess an innocent and untainted view of cause and effect. They are not yet so instilled with the idea of the world affecting them as they are of their own power to affect the world. So if we could turn the tables in our imagination and see meaning behind coincidence and use that meaning to inspire hope in the efficacy of our wishes, our prayers, our meditations, then we may be able to overcome despair and suggest something about the importance of positive thinking.

Positive thinking not only penetrates the realms of fiction and religion, but also science to a certain extent. Science may devalue the religious idea of ultimate Truth, but “practitioners” and “believers” of science still tend to positively press toward the attainable perfection of a process or theory. There exists a belief that the answer is out there and available to us by means of the scientific method. This is a surprisingly optimistic point of view, whereas we usually depict scientists as being dull pessimists. But then again, science is not so different from religion in that it takes a certain amount of faith to take on any kind of study, objective or not. Perhaps most people do not wrestle with proving that they are actually in control, or that what they are trying to learn actually exists, but these questions underlie any real pursuit of knowledge, and even if they are not acknowledged outright, the existence of answers is an assumption that we rely on everyday.

In The Neverending Story, we see the juxtaposition of many opposing forces. Hope and despair are the most prevalent, but also science versus magic, good versus evil, and adult versus child mentality. Throughout Atreyu’s journey, he comes upon many different personages. The first stage of his journey involves seeking out Morla, the wisest and most ancient being in all of Fantasia, lodged somewhere in the deadly Swamps of Sadness. He is a gigantic tortoise who speaks very slowly and tangentially, similar to Treebeard or Tom Bombadil from The Lord of the Rings. He “does not care whether or not [he] cares,” and professes not to care about the Empress or the fate of Fantasia. We can read Morla as representative of adults in this world. Framing the Fantasia epic is the story of Bastian, the boy reading and being affected by The Neverending Story, which is shown intermittently throughout the film. His father tells him at the beginning of the film to keep his feet on the ground and his head out of the sky. Like Bastian’s father, Morla is so old that he no longer dwells in a world of imagination or hope. This juxtaposition of young and old encourages us to keep our minds fresh and our outlooks youthful.

Atreyu trudges back through the Swamps of Sadness and is nearly lost, but for a dragon that saves his life—a luck-dragon, named Falkor, a giant white furry representation of the saving force of Luck. He flies 9,891 miles “on luck,” dropping Atreyu off right near the Southern Oracle, saying “never give up and luck will find [you].” These themes of hope and luck reappear throughout the film. Atreyu also meets two characters who are foils for each other, a man and wife, representing science and magic. The old wife, or magic, says she decides when it’s her husband’s turn to deal with “the patient” Atreyu. The husband’s “scientific speciality” is the Southern Oracle. He manipulates various crystals, glass beakers filled with colorful liquids, and cogs upon cogs. Here we get a sense of magic’s being a partner to science, rather than an opposition, as if science and magic are each only one facet of a larger reality. Science is traditionally construed as the opposite of magic, but drawing from this story and other cultural examples, we see that the relationship between the two need not be so polarized.

The effects of science on our collective cultural imagination are not all negative, of course. Studies in the scientific realm have opened up new doors for our imaginations, with discoveries ranging from the atomic level to the cosmological. But this search for an absolute and objective reality, something which exists outside of and independent of ourselves, has created an orthodoxy of thought. We believe that science is the ultimate answer and leave no room for other realities in our collective consciousness.

The Azande people of southern Sudan, studied by E. E. Evans-Pritchard in the late 1920s, provide a bolstering ideal for science, that of witchcraft, or negative energy. To the Azande, coincidences do not just happen, they are brought on by someone’s negative thinking towards someone else, intended or not. This acts as a filler in between the “cracks” left by science. For example, people seeking shade may find it under the roof of a granary shelter. The poles holding up the shelter are commonly eaten away by termites and the shelters collapse inevitably. But if there are people under the shelter when it collapses, it is the work of witchcraft. Finding meaning behind coincidences is generally what makes stories strong, just as Falkor sweeps down and saves Atreyu at his final moment, or how Bastian picks up a book in a dusty bookshop run by a grumpy old man and learns precisely what he needs to in order to restore hope and meaning to his life.

So after reading this adult review of a great children’s tale, I ask you to take a step back and try and see the magic in the world using your imagination. Try and understand that the lines between science, magic, and religion are not as clear as we think, but that the world is a series of overlapping coincidences—such as that grand coincidence of the primordial “soup” of hydrogen, ammonia, and methane reacting together to form amino acids when lightning struck them, then forming proteins, then forming basic single-celled organisms, etc., which inevitably led to you sitting there reading this article, hopefully gleaning something meaningful from this jumbled mess of characters symbolizing concepts that you only understand because of countless other events in your life. Overcome the Nothing by recognizing how many beautiful coincidences it took for you to be here.