The Farmer And The Clown: How We Ennoble Each Other With Kindness

The Farmer and the Clown: The Warm Wordless Story of an Unlikely Friendship and How We Ennoble Each Other with Kindness

"One never notices what has been done," Marie Curie wrote in a letter to her brother upon receiving her second graduate degree, "one can only see what remains to be done." She could have easily been talking about the endless world of discovery that is children's literature. Here comes a woefully belated, wonderfully apt addition to this year's best children's books: The Farmer and the Clown(public library | IndieBound) – a sweet, immeasurably warm wordless story by author and illustrator Marla Frazee.

Reminiscent of The Lion and the Bird – still my favorite picture-book this side of the millennium – the tale follows the accidental, unlikely friendship that develops between a kindly old farmer and a child-clown after the little boy falls out of the circus train amid the farmer's patch of the prairie.

The farmer makes an endearing effort to include this wholly alien new friend into daily life, while trying to address the little boy's wholly alien needs as best as he can imagine them. From the generosity of his intention springs a celebration of the mutual elevation made possible by dropping our assumptions about ourselves, others, and who is welcome in our world.

By choosing such a gentle and innocent embodiment of the clown character – the frightening clown is, after all, a common trope in horror that feeds on a common fear many people share – Frazee also reminds us, just as gently, that the strangenesses we fear can become our most deeply rewarding experiences, if we bring to them a warm curiosity and a generous quality of presence.

It could be, too, that by amplifying the strangeness of the child to the point of clownish caricature, Frazee is poking gentle fun at the hallmark of mediocrity in children's literature – the idea that the child is somehow a different species to be addressed in some inauthentic other language, which C.S. Lewis so spiritedly rebuked.

The story's ending emanates an assuring reminder that even though life isever-flowing and we live in a universe of constant change – that, as Henry Miller observed, "all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis" – even brief encounters can imprint us with their affectionate grace, the warmth of which burns in the hearth of the soul forever.

The Farmer and the Clown is absolutely luminous in its entirety – the kind of deeply, universally human story Tolkien must have had in mind when he insisted that there is no such thing as writing for children. Complement it with Winston and George, a very different but no less delightful tale of another unlikely friendship.