It is equally at home when it struts as ancient myth as when it postures as Pre-Raphaelite faux medieval chanson or capers as nonsense nursery rhyme. We recognize faërie from a long time ago in a galaxy far away. We recognize faërie vitally alert on the island of Ariel and Caliban and the magician Prospero. We know faërie even when it goes viral, as we encounter it in Hollywood’s Cindergirl of the hour, caught this very moment on today’s blogs and tabloids. But put away that cell phone and stop Googling her. We’re attending deeper mysteries than Hollywood generally knows how to handle.

For, in faërie, how far are we, really, from the darkness brooding over the water and from the spirit of the Almighty breathed into the clay? How far from mistletoe and blood sacrifice, from the ancient transactions of scapegoating and ransom? How far from the flame-winged angel in a hundred biblical dreams, how far from Marley in chains or the phantom on the ramparts of Elsinore? How far from the savanna where the leopard got his spots or from the night sky of the frozen north, east of the sun and west of the moon, featuring the spangled celestial figures of myth? Faërie is born of the oldest question of our individual lives and of our species: why?

In faërie, how far are we from the golem? the reindeer on the roof? the lilies on the altar? the incense rising to the oculus? How far from the salt thrown over the shoulder, the blessing that follows the sneeze? How far from the presentation of our newborn to the village of life, how far from the presentation of our corpse to the necropolis of the lost? We cannot stop wondering why, and so faërie is nearer than we know.

Faëirie is origin and eschatology, writ cunning and runic. It speaks to darknesses on both sides of the glare of life, that glare brighter than spotlights.

We recognize it still — as adults — because our capacity to appreciate it was honed not only in the childhood of the race but in our own early years.