I have just spent a glorious few days at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. The first evening we saw a production of The Tempest. As I lay in my hotel bed afterward I remembered the brilliant colors—the velvety black sky, the clouds of rose gold, the cobalt sea, the saffron robe of Ariel. I thought of Prospero, the magician, here played by a woman, who gets revenge on her enemies by tempest and shipwreck, but eventually learns to forgive, and "drowns her book" of magic. I savored the happy ending: Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, will be married; Prospero will again rule her duchy; Ariel with be free. I also recalled Mt. Shasta, that vision in gray and white, which had risen like a ghost in the distance, then towered over the highway, then receded again as we had approached the Oregon border that afternoon. As I relaxed into sleep I thought to myself, "I need more magic in my life."

A few days and many plays later I remembered this thought, and began to wonder what I could possibly have meant by it. I am not longing for spells and wands and magic books. And although Ariel was played by an elegant young man and it might be nice to be followed about by such a sprite, who would make tea and iron my linen shirts (I wonder—could he grade papers?), this surely is not what I meant either.

I don’t want real magic; magic is clearly a metaphor for something else. But what?

I was reminded of a recent incident in my Sabbath School class, where someone said something was "magical," and immediately an anthropologist on the back row gave us a short lecture on why magic is such a bad word: superstition, the idea that God can be at our beck and call, that if we sacrifice something (caffeine? ice cream? our first-born son?) or perform some righteous act (keep Sabbath? Pay tithe? Recycle?) that God will then owe us something in return. This is what she meant by magic, and it’s not hard to see why she was agin it. This type of magic is all about control: of others, of God, of the weather, even: The Tempest .

But of course, this is not what was meant, and not what I mean. In fact, it occurs to me that the magic I mean may be pretty much the exact opposite: it seems to evoke letting go, embracing what comes, being prepared for anything.

When we use the word "magic" these days, I suspect that we often mean a moment or experience of beauty and delight, often fleeting, sometimes serendipitous: a baby’s laugh, the sound of a harp, the ray of sun on a distant hillside, a rainbow from out of nowhere, fireflies on a misty night. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream…)

Here I cannot resist turning to the master of magic, the creator of Narnia. C. S. Lewis said this about magic: "When I say ’magic’ I am not thinking of the paltry and pathetic techniques by which fools attempt and quacks pretend to control nature. I mean rather what is suggested by fairy-tale sentences like ’This is a magic flower, and if you carry it the seven gates will open to you of their own accord.’…I should define magic in this sense as ’objective efficacy which cannot be further analysed’" (Letters to Malcolm, 103). Lewis is here talking about the Lord’s Supper, and the fact that what it does cannot be explained.

But his definition, "objective efficacy which cannot be further analysed," seems to touch on what I mean. We suddenly have a glimpse of color, we catch a sound or a smell, and something happens, we know not what or why, but we have felt a change. For an instant, life has more depth, more meaning. Time has stood still, and we have seen through into—somewhere else.

I now I think I am beginning to come close to understanding what it is I am wanting.

First, beauty. I touch and inhale the scent of the deep red rose in my garden, admire the fiery comets of my columbine, and to me they are magical. Why should the world contain such things? Why should they be here, and I here to apprehend them? I look at the print of Gauguin’s Landscape with Two Breton Women above my bed, or listen to Vaughn Williams’ Serenade to Music (with words from The Merchant of Venice) , and I love a world where such colors and textures and words and sounds are created by other humans. "O Brave New World that hath such creatures in it!" cries Miranda.

Next, art. I think the reason I came away feeling I wanted "more magic" was not because The Tempest was about magic (after all, in the end Prospero gives up magic as too manipulative), but in a curious way because of the "magic" of theater itself: we sit in a darkened space for three hours and concentrate on believing in what is happening on stage. We know that they are actors, not three Russian sisters longing for Moscow, not a Danish prince with a problem, but people like ourselves. We know we are not gazing into someone’s garden or living room. We know that days, weeks, or years are not passing by between scenes. Yet we choose to believe, we want to believe, and somehow, the costumes and painted boards and even iambic pentameter become something else: an experience full of meaning that, if we are lucky, sheds light on our lives in the very unmagical world of checkbooks and auto repair, dry cleaning and the common cold. And we come out feeling that we have lived a whole lifetime in those three hours. That we have broken through into—someplace else.

Perhaps this, then, is the heart of it: time itself, which binds us so tightly with its tick-tick-ticking away toward death, is broken sometimes. We fly free for a moment, and it feels like magic. The creative life force that made the universe, expressed both in natural beauty and in the human desire to create—this is the deep, strange magic that we need, the magic that turned my four days in Ashland into much more, as though I had traveled not to Oregon but to some other universe and back—vacation indeed.

EMAIL THIS ARTICLE