The Ogress and the Orphans

“Indeed, one could say that the fire in the Library was the best thing—the very best thing—that had ever happened to the Mayor.

A lucky coincidence, even.”

This passage comes after the stone relays the details of the night the Library burned. It also foreshadows that the Mayor caused the fire and benefited from the destruction. The idea that the fire is the best thing that happened to the Mayor shows how events are not good or bad without context. Whether a burning building is good or bad depends on the building. The burning of a beloved Library that offered people a place to meet and learn is bad because the people of Stone-in-the-Glen put importance on having such a place. By contrast, the Library took away from the Mayor’s ability to swindle the people because people who think critically are more difficult to fool. For the Mayor, the Library’s destruction was good because it helped him accomplish his goal.

“How does a lovely town become an unlovely town?

And if it is unlovely now, could it have ever been lovely to begin with?

And furthermore, assuming it was lovely in the past, was it possible, really and truly, for it to ever become lovely again?”

The orphans at the Orphan House are too young to remember Stone-in-the-Glen before the fire, and these are just some of the many questions they ask themselves about the town. Each question depends on assumed definitions of loveliness and unloveliness, where Stone-in-the-Glen before the fire was lovely and after the fire was unlovely. The first question focuses on the specifics of the change, asking about the circumstances needed to make a lovely town become unlovely. The second question calls to the idea that we can never truly know what happened in the past. The orphans know the town only as an unlovely place, and they wonder if it ever was truly lovely. Even for people old enough to remember the town before, memory is different for every person, so some might think the town was lovely while others may not. The final question looks to the future, asking what changes would have to take place to restore loveliness and whether those changes are a reverse of the changes that made the town unlovely. Together, these questions represent the past, present, and future and the complex nature of understanding change.

“‘An idea, my dear,’ Myron tutted, ‘can never be stolen, because it cannot be owned. Just as the sun cannot be owned and the air cannot be owned and the rain cannot be owned. A seed is planted in the ground and grows thanks to the gifts of sun and rain. Does the seed own the idea of growing? Does the sun own the idea of shining, or the rain own the idea of watering the earth? Of course not. Ideas are self-replicating. The notion that they can be limited or hoarded is nonsense.’”

These lines of Myron’s dialogue come after Anthea gets annoyed at someone in town for stealing her idea. Myron posits that ideas cannot be stolen. This idea is represented in real life by United States copyright law, which does not allow ideas to be copywritten. Myron’s speech speaks to the fluid and uncontrollable nature of ideas. The sun may shine, but it is not the only thing capable of shining, and it’s shine would not be made any less by something else that shines. Similarly, two people may have the exact same idea, but each will likely pursue it in a very different way. Neither person stole the other’s idea, and both ideas could be combined to form a new idea.

“It took a lot of food to keep fifteen children fed, after all. More every day. Because children grow.

Another fact.

And that fact mattered a lot.

It wasn’t unkindness. It was just arithmetic.”

Here, Anthea thinks about the rule that she’ll have to leave the Orphan House when she turns 14, putting the ideas behind that rule into physical terms. Anthea understands how much food the Orphan House needs and how much food she eats, which means she understands how much more food the house could distribute to everyone else if she wasn’t there. Much like how objects or events are not bad or good by themselves, this passage demonstrates how facts are not kind or unkind without context. For Anthea, the math is unkind because it shows that the Orphan House would be better off without her. For the other orphans, the fact is both kind and unkind. It is kind because Anthea’s leaving would mean more food, but it is unkind because they don’t want to lose Anthea.

“The volume on his lap was an ancient copy of an even more ancient book. He had to be careful turning the pages. It was, according to the introduction, the last work that the philosopher Timaeus had ever written, and was largely disregarded by historians and scholars, as it was short, imaginative, and not satisfactorily conclusive. All throughout, the speakers interrupt one another, digress, threaten to leave the room, and never actually answer any specific questions directly. Instead, they slyly slide this way and that, forcing the readers to find the answer on their own. Bartleby thought it was the greatest book he had ever read.”

Here, Bartleby reads one of his favorite philosophy books. The fact that he loves it because it never arrives at any solid conclusions shows how Bartleby is a critical thinker who views philosophy as a means to think about questions, rather than definitively answer them. Other scholars shunned the book itself because it doesn’t answer the questions it posits, which speaks to the competing views on learning. The scholars who criticize the book do so because they want someone to provide them with answers, so they don’t have to be uncertain. In truth, even if the book offered answers, there is nothing to say those answers are the correct ones, but people rely on certainty to understand the world and to feel settled. Bartleby is comfortable with the idea that nothing is certain, and he represents the idea that truth is not a stable construct. Rather, truth shifts as new information is learned, and facts may be proven false with new discoveries.

“This is not unusual. Books, after all, have their own peculiar gravity, given the collective weight of words and thoughts and ideas. Just as the gravitational field around a black hole bends and wobbles the space around it, so, too, does the tremendous mass of ideas of a large collection of books create its own dense gravity. Space gets funny around books.”

Here, the stone describes the reading room at the Orphan House. The orphans have noticed that time works differently in the reading room, and the stone attributes this to the wobbly nature of so many ideas in one place. The measurement of time through hours and minutes is a human-made idea, and time likely works in more complex ways than humans understand. The passing of time seems to change when we do something we enjoy, as opposed to an activity we dread, so it stands to reason that objects could influence the passage of time. This description foreshadows how the orphans and Ogress have plenty of time to create books overnight.

“‘Once upon a time,’ Elijah said at last, ‘there was a dragon who disguised himself as a crow.’

‘You already told us that one,’ Iggy said.

‘Fine,’ Elijah said, undeterred. ‘Once upon a time, there was a dog who had been blinded from a terrible beating by his cruel master. After wandering the land, lost and alone, he was rescued by a murder of crows.’”

This scene is one example of Elijah telling the stories he hears from the wood of the Orphan House. The second story is that of the dog that comes to live with the Ogress, though Elijah is not aware of it. The first story is not told during the book, and it may be that it is the story of the Mayor after he leaves Stone-in-the-Glen. Elijah may be interrupted from telling it because it would spoil a yet untold story or because it is not relevant to the book. Elijah’s unbothered nature about telling a different story speaks to the eternal nature of tales. Elijah knows the first tale will be there to tell at a later time.

“There is an art to darning socks. It doesn’t do to simply sew the edges of the hole together in a rigid seam, because it will render the sock uncomfortable and unusable from that day forward—it will always feel as though there is a stick inside the sock, which is a terrible way to walk through the world. No, a foundation must be laid, so that the remedy may be carefully woven in. The darning itself must be soft, compliant, and easy on the feet: a person’s heel must not know that a hole was ever there.”

Here, Cass darns a sock shortly before she runs away from the Orphan House. Her description of darning is a metaphor for what she hopes will happen after she leaves. Cass doesn’t yet see herself as an integral part of the Orphan House’s family. She believes her leaving will make more food available and that no one will miss her because they have enough to eat. Like the sock she darns, she wants her separation from the Orphan House to be smooth so that no one notices the place where she used to fit. On a broader level, the darning is a metaphor for moving through life. People come and go, and situations change. We cannot stop these things, and we aim to make transitions as painless and comfortable as possible, so we aren’t left moving forward in constant distress.

“The next morning, Cass was still in the woods. Still lost. She ate her potato, finally, but retched it up immediately. It must have gone bad. The world swam. Her mouth was dry. She would need to find a stream soon, but she had no idea how. She gathered mushrooms and berries and realized she didn’t know which were poisonous and which were safe, and she found that it was much harder than she had thought to crack open the nuts that she had harvested from a tree. She looked at her map. It swam in her vision. Surely, she should have gotten out of this forest hours ago. Or even yesterday. Surely, she would have found a warm, dry barn to sleep in, one owned by a cheerful and accommodating farmer, whose smiling wife brought breakfast over on a tray, which is what happens all the time in books. She had no idea that books would betray her in this way. Or maps. The nerve.”

These lines come while Cass is sick and lost alone in the woods. She doesn’t understand why her plan hasn’t gone the way she intended, and she’s too ill to realize that there were contingencies she didn’t plan for. The final lines call to the drawback of stories and the differences between stories and life. The Ogress and the Orphans presents books and stories as powerful forces for good and change. The downside to stories is that they are fictional, and even nonfiction tales are told from only one person’s unique perspective. By themselves, stories do not prepare us for the world. Experience is needed alongside stories so we do not enter the world believing stories are true only to think we’ve been lied to.

“Feelings are funny things. They feel like facts. Sometimes, it is nice to think that they might be facts. If I could transform my feelings into gold coins, I would stack them on my desk and call myself the richest man in the world.”

The Mayor says this to the cobbler when the cobbler goes to ask for help forming a search party to find Cass. The Mayor asks the cobbler for evidence of a kidnapping, and the cobbler says he has none, only a feeling. The Mayor’s response here calls to the difference between emotions and facts, acknowledging that powerful emotions can feel as true as facts. The fact that Cass was not kidnapped illustrates the problem with taking feelings as fact. The cobbler’s feeling is wrong, and acting in accordance with that feeling would only get an innocent person blamed for a crime that was not committed. These lines are one of the few true things the Mayor says during the story, which shows that even people who make a business out of fooling people can be right and honest.

“The butcher was not a bad man. But he was not a good man, either. Was it necessary, he wondered, to be entirely good or entirely bad? Surely, a person could live a perfectly acceptable life being neither.”

The butcher thinks this when he sees the Ogress carrying Cass and assumes that the Ogress is stealing children. The debate he has here supports the idea that people are neither bad nor good without context, and it suggests that “bad” and “good” are too general as labels. A good person may have bad aspects, and a bad person may do good things. There is no dividing line between goodness and badness. There is a gray area in the middle where people are neither bad nor all good, and most people likely fall into this category. The butcher does a good deed when he helps the Ogress rescue the sheep, but his bad actions lead to the fire from which the sheep need to be rescued. The butcher does both good and bad things, yet he has lived a long life regardless of whether he is ultimately good or bad.

“‘Myron,’ Bartleby finally said. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘How are we going to fix this?’ Anthea asked, her voice small and desperate.

Myron said nothing for a long moment. Then he pressed a firm smile onto his creased face. ‘Don’t spend another moment worrying about any of it, my darlings,’ he said, his voice overly bright and brittle. ‘After a day or two, this will all blow over. People lose interest in nonsensical things after a bit. Cooler heads always prevail!’”

This exchange comes after Myron, Bartleby, and Anthea return from the meeting where the butcher tells people the Ogress is stealing children. The crowd’s anger, coupled with their refusal to hear reason, has left the three nervous. Bartleby and Anthea understand the danger of what they just witnessed, but Myron tries to make light of it so they won’t be afraid. Despite Myron’s good intentions, Bartleby and Anthea are not convinced, which shows how children are far more aware of the world than adults often give them credit for. The quality of Myron’s voice shows he doesn’t believe his own words, which questions why adults tell children things they themselves do not believe. Perhaps adults wish to keep children safe from the ugly parts of the world, but ignoring ugliness does not make it go away.

“‘Yes. The people who voted for you would like you to hear them out. If it’s all the same to you. You know. A listening session.’

Well, then, the Mayor thought, relaxing. Listening is much less work than giving a speech. All a person has to do is affix a benevolent expression while thinking about something else entirely!”

Here, the people approach the Mayor to discuss what to do about the Ogress and express their discontent with how her presence near the town has been handled. The Mayor’s response to being asked to listen is likely Barnhill satirizing unhelpful politicians. Rather than taking an interest in what his constituents have to say, the Mayor believes he doesn’t have to pay attention to them at all. Rather, he can pretend to listen until he hears something he can use to benefit himself and then twist that thing to suit his needs. His observation that listening is easier than speaking is ironic because truly listening is far more difficult than talking.

“‘It seems to me that we have come to an agreement. No one wants to continue having an ogress—an ogress, I tell you!—endangering our safety and tranquility by living as bold as brass on the far edge of our beautiful town. Of course not. It isn’t fair. You work so hard! Does the Ogress work hard? Not that I’ve seen. Not that you’ve seen. She sits there from sunup to sundown inside her crooked house, while you work hard all day long. That sounds like laziness. I can’t abide laziness. She is stealing the days of rest and indolence that rightfully belong to you! I can’t abide stealers!’”

This is part of the Mayor’s response to the townspeople’s complaints about the Ogress. Rather than addressing the actual concerns of the people, the Mayor spews nonsense that sounds like he is agreeing, but is really him using the crowd’s own energy to make the people even more upset. The Mayor posits that the Ogress is lazy because she stays in her house, but he has no idea what the Ogress does in her house all day. He has no authority to say she is lazy. The Mayor goes on to argue that the Ogress is stealing laziness from the people, but whether the Ogress is lazy or not has no bearing on what the people do and whether or not they are lazy.

“It was remarkable, Anthea thought, how it took only one person deciding to do good things, and then convincing others to join in, to create a cascade of good deeds, each one sparking the next. Just think if everyone decided to do good. Just think if everyone decided to do so every day. Or, if not everyone, what if some did, and it still expanded? This was a whole new kind of arithmetic. How long would it take for those good deeds to compound? And what would the town look like then?”

Here, Anthea considers the mathematics of goodness. She concludes that goodness is similar to the argument Myron made about ideas earlier, though she doesn’t quite realize it. Like ideas, goodness expands on itself. One person does good, which leads to another person doing good, until multiple people are doing good things for each other. Anthea doesn’t have math for the spread of goodness, but she understands that goodness in great amounts has the power to change people and lives. Her questions also answer those posed earlier about Stone-in-the-Glen’s capacity to be lovely. Even if the town had never been lovely, the spread of goodness could make it so, and Stone-in-the-Glen became unlovely when people stopped doing things to help one another.

“In the center of the Center Square sat a stone that no one noticed. No one had noticed it for ages. Even when they paused near it or lingered next to it or set their bag on top of it to give their shoulders a break for a moment or two, they still didn’t really notice the Stone. It was drab, after all. And nondescript. There was a bunch of old wood strewn about it. And because it was already messy, people didn’t notice themselves leaving a sack of old, rusty hinges, for example. Or a bent metal bar. Or a broken table. Or the splintered leftovers of an ancient school desk. Or the remains of an old handcart that had long ago pushed its last load.”

The stone described here is the one narrating the story and also the one the Mayor built a box around in Chapter 7. The way people don’t notice the stone shows how distraction keeps us from seeing the world around us. People are so wrapped up in their lives that they have no time or desire to notice a stone that is like every other stone to them. At first glance, the pile of discarded objects that forms around the stone seems to be junk, but Anthea and others take things from this pile that they use to fix or build things. Rather than junk, the things people leave are a way for them to help one another without realizing that’s what they’re doing. They think of the pile as junk, so they leave things because doing so benefits themselves, even while it also helps others.

“‘I’m not wrong,’ Anthea said as loud as she could. ‘You need to tell everyone. People do stupid things when they get riled up. They do stupid things when they believe something that is untrue. They make mistakes that they later regret! Someone could get hurt. It isn’t logical to allow falsehoods to spread!’”

Anthea says this during one of the Mayor’s rallies in the town square. The people are yelling about how much they hate the Ogress because of all the ways she’s harmed the town, and Anthea is trying to make them see that the Ogress has never hurt them. The people don’t want to listen, though. They’d rather blame someone for their hardships than realize they are responsible for their problems. Anthea argues it isn’t logical to let lies spread, which calls to how emotions and logic do not mix well. The people are angry and afraid, two emotions that cannot be fought with logic. Angry, scared people do not want to hear facts—they just want to feel better.

“The cobbler’s wife gave an exasperated shrug. ‘You sillies! It doesn’t matter who did it,’ she said to anyone who would listen. ‘The thing that matters is that it happened. The thing that matters is that this act of kindness and generosity could have been done by anyone. Anyone at all! The world is filled with goodness, and our response should not be silence and suspicion. You have a responsibility to be grateful. You have a responsibility to do good as a result. Be good and do good. That’s the lesson.’”

This passage comes shortly after the first time the townspeople notice other people have also received mysterious gifts. They all ask who was responsible for giving, and none of them know. Finally, the cobbler’s wife says it doesn’t matter as long as the good deed was done. She stresses the importance of not knowing because it means the deed could have been done by anyone, even someone the people dislike, like the Ogress. She also speaks to the harm caused by responding to goodness with suspicion. More often than not, people do good things to help someone, not to make people wonder what they want in return. The people of Stone-in-the-Glen have been so bamboozled by the Mayor that they struggle to accept goodness because they are sure the giver has an ulterior motive. The ending lines speak to the responsibility of people to be thankful. We typically think of responsibility as doing or giving, but we also have a responsibility to receive so someone else can give.

“They remembered that a story, in the mind of the reader, is like music. And discussing stories among other minds and other hearts feels like a symphony. They remembered how ideas make their own light, and how words have their own mass and weight and being.”

These lines come while the people are discussing the books the Ogress and orphans made. The people remember things about stories and ideas that they forgot after the Library burned down. These memories lead them to be kinder and more open-minded, which then leads to discussions and the exchange of ideas. Barnhill compares ideas to music. A single instrument may play a song, and that song is enhanced when other instruments add their own harmonies and accompaniments. Similarly, a single idea may grow and expand from something pleasant to something with extraordinary power to change the world.

“‘A funny thing happened to me when I sat on that stone. I...saw things. Not with my eyes, but inside my head.’

The Ogress nodded. ‘Well, that is the best sort of seeing, of course. Our eyes deceive us all the time! If we want to know what’s true, we need to look with our minds. And then, if we want to know what is vital, we need to look with our hearts.’”

Here, Anthea has just told the Ogress about the stone in the town square that she found while making the chair for Myron. The Ogress’s response speaks to the different types of seeing. She argues that our eyes deceive us, which has some truth to it. All sorts of information are presented to us daily, and our eyes (and other senses) take it in. Only by analyzing the information can we learn what is true or false, and sometimes we must rely on our emotions to help us determine what feels right. Emotions may cloud facts, but they can also help us find which truths are best for ourselves and others.

“‘No, seriously,’ he persisted. ‘What is a neighbor?’

‘Use a dictionary,’ Anthea said acidly. She had moved on to writing a story and had inexplicably found herself deep in a long-winded description of different sorts of drill bits. She shook her head. Why was this so much easier for Elijah?

Bartleby was undeterred. ‘No. I’m not talking about dictionary definitions. A definition lives on the surface. Think like a philosopher—look at the thing from within. What is the essence of neighborliness? What does it mean to be a neighbor?’”

This passage while the children make books for the townspeople touches on a few things. First, it shows how we all have different strengths. Telling stories comes easily to Elijah, but for Anthea, stories get bogged down in details. Anthea thinks technically, which leads her stories to sound more like instruction manuals. She has a different writing skill set from Elijah, but that doesn’t mean she can’t learn to tell stories more effectively. Second, Bartleby’s question speaks to the difference between definitions and understanding. A dictionary offers the literal meaning of a word and little beyond that. Philosophy, by contrast, seeks to understand the concepts behind words. A dictionary may define a neighbor as someone who lives in close physical proximity to us, which is enough for a basic understanding. However, being neighborly adds another layer of complexity to the idea of neighbors. It implies more than just simply living close by and offers a potential set of criteria for being a true neighbor.

“Burning down the Library was the best thing he could have done for this town. And had anyone thanked him? No, they had not.

Oh, the Mayor realized with a start. That was a secret, wasn’t it? Well. Good thing I didn’t say it out loud.

The difference between secret and not secret was a bit fuzzy to him every now and again. He blamed time. It was one of the problems with living as long as he had—time had a tendency to loop and twist and wobble. And this made the difference between truth and lies even fuzzier than normal. This, the Mayor felt, was not his fault. Should things not be true simply because he said they were?”

Throughout the book, stories are described as having an effect on time. Here, the Mayor thinks about his own story—burning down the Library and the aftermath. It may be that since the Mayor tells himself a different reality than what is factual, time bends around these opposing stories. His thankfulness for not saying his secret out loud shows how he doesn’t have a problem with bad actions that benefit him, so long as no one finds out what he did. The final paragraph of this passage speaks to accepting facts. The Mayor believes something should be a fact because he believes it is true, but this is not how facts work. The Mayor could say that the Ogress burned down the Library, but just because he wants it to be true doesn’t mean it’s a fact.

“What is a neighbor? the book asked, yet again. A neighbor is similar to you. Or they are different from you. Or they are equal parts similar and different. A neighbor shares all your values. Or some of them. Or none of them. A neighbor is someone you care about anyway. A neighbor is someone who helps you for no reason at all. They help because you are a person, and because they are a person, and people help one another. A neighbor is someone who shows up just because.”

This passage is from the book the Ogress and orphans write about being neighborly. The definitions of a neighbor given here could also be definitions for a person, and taken together, these definitions are the antidote to division. When people believe others are valid regardless of beliefs or values, they do not hate people for being different. People do not have to share beliefs or values we hold for us to treat them well. We do not have to like the beliefs or values others hold, but that doesn’t mean they are wrong or we should dismiss their beliefs and values as unfit. Overall, this passage speaks to how communities are made when groups come together, whether or not everyone in a group shares the same values and beliefs.