In all the best stories, there is an Other World behind the curtain of the ordinary world.
Behind boring old England, there’s the whole world of witches and wizards and Hogwarts. There’s Narnia in Narnia, obviously, and Aslan’s country, too. There’s the Matrix in The Matrix – or the real world, depending on your starting point. Middle Earth is kind of an Other World in itself, but even there, we have another sort of normal world in the comfortable bustle of the Shire, only for the veil of safe normalcy to be torn apart when Gandalf pokes his nose into things. It’s the same, too, in Star Wars, where the Force runs beneath everything, even if Han Solo thinks it’s a hokey old religion. There is the Cognitive Realm in The Stormlight Archive, and above (or under) that, the Spiritual Realm. There is the Spirit World in Avatar: The Last Airbender (which all reputable sources agree to be the best story under the name, and definitely much better than the stuff with the blue people). There is even, in Watership Down, the world of El-ahrairah, the Prince of Rabbits.
In the great fantasy stories (these happen to be my favorite kind), the Other World tends to be an actual place. But even in other stories, the ones set in our normal old world, the Other World is nearly always there as a hint or something sharper: Andre’s glimpse of heaven or Pierre’s forced winter march in War and Peace, Sivert’s “thin remembrance of something wild and beautiful” in Growth of the Soil, Leslie’s haunting Terebithia.
I’ve only scratched the barest beginning of the surface with these examples, of course. I’m sure you can think of many more. Joseph Campbell, who spent a lifetime collecting and codifying myths, calls this realm “the supernatural” or “special” world; it exists in basically every myth across every culture, and it is always the place to which heroes are called, usually against their will and often before they believe in its existence. But the call is irresistible. Once it comes, heroes are inevitably dragged past the threshold of the ordinary, and then stories really begin.
The Other World is, by its nature, a hard thing to pin down and take the measure of. It is wilder than our world, deeper, more alive. To picture it in your head is to see the red Alpenglow on mountains stretching to a broad horizon, or a vast expanse of shivering stars, or “a far green country under a swift sunrise.” It is much warmer, or very cold. The colors may be deeper, the light richer, the people grander. The Other World is more important than our world. It’s more true.
It’s also less accessible, less predictable, and far harder to control. It’s trickier. It is given, not taken; you must be called into it. You can’t get into Narnia whenever you happen to want to – Aslan has to want you there. There is only one Avatar who can enter the Spirit World, and it’s not easy work. One doesn’t simply take the Ring to Mordor. Only El-ahrairah can meet with the Black Rabbit, and even he nearly dies. If you attempt to use the Other World or something from it to your own ends, you will die or be ruined. Things are dangerous in the Other World, and people are small.
And one more thing that I’ve noticed, something that is wonderful and terrible: The Other World is concerned with our world, more concerned than we might like. It is Other, but it is usually not very far apart. It is intertwined with our world, right beneath or behind or between. It is always, as C.S. Lewis said, breaking in. It’s at King’s Cross Station, if you know where to look.
I guess there’s a chance that our pull toward Other Worlds is nothing more than a manifestation of our psychological need to process uncertainty, a coping mechanism explained by chemicals and sociology, a nice little metaphor of our own making. But the stories themselves seem to suggest exactly the opposite: There is, they say again and again, something out there Other than us.
I have a very great hope that they’re right. Keep your eyes open.
