On Peter Pan
As often happens during late summer nights, I tend to feel a familiar soft wallop of pre-fall anxiety and bitter nostalgia.
This summer has been a very lonely one, requiring more distractions than I’d been prepared for in my arsenal of overwork. One recent late night had Peter Pan crossing my mind; the boy (or girl - the stage production was a gender bender ahead of its time) who refused to grow up.
As a youngster, I repeated Halloween costumes often. I spent three (four?) ‘weens as Peter Pan. I loved the idea of him; people seemed to leave him alone, and he did what he liked: a tempting thought for any child stricken with an imagination. I never took a closer look at the thing that Peter Pan was, and maybe what that made me, hanging back as his Shadow.
As it turns out, Peter Pan is a horrific creature.
In the original stories by author J.M. Barrie, the reader learns that Peter’s first visceral emotion was that of being replaceable. Beware, or Mommy will abandon you (especially if you take off, and don’t return for a year without leaving a note).
Like any child, he learned to take what he needed (and wanted) to survive. The two were unrecognizably contaminated by his inability to discern between them, an unimportant detail for that of a flying orphan. Peter survived as a robber, making the best of a grim life, creating a family of his own: the Lost Boys, who each hid a secret of their own.
Each boy was stolen from his family.
Worse still?
Once a Lost Boy showed signs of aging, Pan would ‘thin them out’ (as Barrie described), hinting of an immortal child’s bloodlust to satiate the hungry god of youth. More interesting still are the Boys that survived Pan’s bloody campaigns: they became the Pirates.
Easy come, easy go.
During this particular night, feeling large around this waif of a human shuddering under a tall breeze, I wondered if this was how Pan felt in the company of his Lost Boys. Maybe the Boys he slew stayed with him, in a way he could never allow, while they had the ability to leave him.
Better the devil you know.
This is the character that many, myself included, mistakenly envied. Sitting in the dark, I wondered how many of my young self’s heroes were this brutal in their three-dimensional forms. Feeling a distinct lack of existential dread, I pressed the iPad onto its keyboard sleeve.
One discovery was quite enough for this night.