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    Parents are also wise in telling their children magical stories because such stories introduce children to enchantment, a state of being that serves us in all sorts of practical ways. Without enchantment, it’s hard to create, hard to learn, and hard to have the kind of hope that keeps life fresh. It is even hard to do science.
    Sociologist Mark A. Schneider defines enchantment as encountering events or objects “so peculiar and so beyond our present understanding as to leave us convinced that were they to be understood, our image of how the world operates would be radically transformed.” Adults seek to be enchanted by things that are real and “at the same time uncanny, weird, mysterious, or awesome.” That sense of mystery and awe compels students to learn and scientists to experiment. It caused me to keep looking at the magical community even when I wanted to look away.
    To become enchanted is a valuable skill, more essential than it has ever been before. To understand the inner truth of a person who is radically different from you, to penetrate a belief that seems preposterous, to grasp a faith that violates everything you’ve held dear, you must become enchanted. It’s the only way. It’s not difficult. Look into the wide eyes of a laughing baby, let yourself fall into that innocence, and for a breathless moment you can be taken over. People are enchanted every day—by a baby, by a flower, or by the sound of their own voice speaking ideas they didn’t know they had. But to become enchanted by that which frightens or repels you—that’s less common and perhaps even more vital.
    We’ve never needed that type of enchantment more than we do right now. We live in a time when we are being asked to encounter, appreciate, and accept people and ideas that are utterly foreign tous. We are told that we must stop labeling the stranger as strange, as odd, as less than we are. The fate of our world, stocked with bigger and bigger bombs each day, may depend on it. The happy habit of declaring ourselves the “true” people and labeling outsiders the “other,” of calling our ways good and other ways evil, has been with us since we crawled out of the cave. Now we are being forced to consider and to accept or reject more and more people with ideas and values that are completely contrary to what we have always believed. The demands are coming faster and faster in human relations, in religion, and in science.
    It’s no accident that scientists are on the frontiers of the new. They seek to be enchanted often—but only briefly, Schneider writes. As soon as they understand what has enchanted them, its power is explained and therefore taken away. For them, that is the victory. They have proven that the enchanting thing is as mundane as everything else in the world. Like anything else that has been dissected, it is then dead. The great benefit of dissection is that anything is much more useful once its parts are understood and can be manipulated for other uses.
    One of the most poignant stories of how science giveth and science taketh away comes from Georgia’s Sapelo Island, among a people called the Geechee. They were an isolated people, and thus disenchantment came later for them than for others. It started when scientists with the Marine Institute of the University of Georgia came to the island and became friendly enough with the local people to learn their lore, according to God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man. The Geechee told them about a ball of light sometimes seen in the swamps called the jack-o’-lantern and about a spirit called the hag that visited people during the night.
    â€œThe scientists took away all the mystical, magical things about the jack-o’-lantern by saying that what we saw as a floating ball oflight was something that naturally occurs over a low-lying damp area,” wrote Cornelia Walker Bailey. “What caused that