As I went to sleep last night, I nestled under my covers and read, to myself, a bedtime story.

It wasn't a children's picture book; it also was not a complex short story made for grown-ups. No, it was a simple, highly readable, feels-like-warm-cookies fairy tale. One could certainly argue for its complexities- one could argue for the complexities of any story of any level. But the story and its message were designed to be simple, sweet, and clear. And it was consciously placed in a book alongside an 80-page essay written by the same big-name professor.

The story, "Leaf by Niggle," demonstrates Professor Tolkien's idea (laid out in "On Fairy-Stories") that fairy stories belong to everyone, not just the naïve and certainly not just the young. Fairy stories and the imagination are both important and fantastic as demonstrations of the human capacity to create.

Responses to the professor's fascination with fairy stories came in the form of confusion around why someone scholarly and academic, or someone in such a troubled world, should bother himself with a literary genre designed, it would seem, to shelter children. "Tolkien," they would ask, "Isn't this just escapism?" Tolkien would smile and answer, "Yes."

Tolkien believed firmly that escapism is not a negative term or concept, and I am convinced. If the world is indeed troubled, why wouldn't we want to escape? Where did the idea come from that to be an intelligent, active, enlightened adult, we need to stop trying to run away from our problems with childish activities? It is not immature or funny or naïve or, really, childish, at all.

I'm going to eat funny face pancakes and go to parks and read my fairy stories. I'm also going to do my taxes and call my senators and representatives and write my essays and challenge people in conversation. Because the dualistic notion that everything cute and fun is either for kids or quirky, and that everything dealing with a troubled world is for adults, is a recipe for disaster, burnout, and, quite frankly, existential misery.

And besides, escapism, having fun with a fairy story, is a significant action intellectually and politically. It says that the human imagination matters, that we need not enslave ourselves to a difficult world from which we cannot escape. Because we can escape- through our own imaginations. And this is a perfectly valid concept within intellectual traditions.

Escapism is a beautiful way to maintain wonder, so long as we do not run away permanently. Even the mystical must exist next to a constant sense of earthly grounding. This week I read a fairy story, a book on metaphysics, and the news, all with an equal sense of interest, vitality, and importance for personal growth. And tonight, I plan to go to sleep drifting peacefully through my imagination.