While Kenneth Grahame’s novel for children “The Wind in the Willows” is in many ways a love letter to home, it also points out a tension between our love for home and our need for pilgrimage. As much as it benefits us to have community, we also benefit from seeking new places and people. The story affirms the benefit of travel and adventure, but with a caveat: Like all good things, adventures are to be had in moderation.
Published in 1908, “The Wind in the Willows” follows the adventures of Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad, all of whom have widely varying relationships to home and different levels of yearning for adventure. Much of the novel follows Toad’s escapades as his friends try to help him rein in his wild and reckless pursuit of adventure. In Toad particularly, we see the love of adventure taken to its excess and the need for stability and a stronger tie to home. By contrast, Mole is the example of an animal who grows as a character and benefits from emerging from his mole hole into the outside world, as we all are sometimes called to do.
Though the good effects of home and travel are mutually exclusive, they beckon to two intense and valid needs: the need for stability found in laying down roots, and the need to be pulled out of our comfort zone and be exposed to new people and ways of thinking.
Grahame shows us that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to how to balance our desire for the hearthside with our yearning for adventure. A life well-lived comes in many different forms, each unique to a particular character.
The important thing, as Grahame shows, is that journeys and adventures have their proper place and season; we hearken to the call of the Wide World when it’s fitting, not just because we see others doing the same. When the call does come, we recognize that we aren’t leaving ourselves behind, but are actually becoming who we’re meant to be.
A Journey in Differing Directions
The novel begins by placing the reader in Mole’s perspective as he heeds the call to leave home. For such a wary, fearful character, he instinctively and rather impulsively decides to make a prolonged stay with Rat at his riverside home. By beginning the story in this way, Grahame orients us with an example of a successful passage to a new, unexplored realm.
Over time, Mole gradually becomes more habituated to the ways of the river, and Rat teaches him how to row. When he tries to brave the Wild Wood alone, he learns his limits in seeking adventures. Before long, Mole feels “emancipated”: He becomes more attuned to the beauty of nature and feels more at ease on the river, discovering new sources of joy. By the end of the book, Mole is honored by Badger for his resourcefulness, and the once fearful character becomes a stalwart figure who supports his friends.
The novel’s four principal characters, while united in their friendship with one another, are in wildly different stations and phases of character development. Because of this disparity and their different natures, the ideal home looks different to each.
From the start of the book, Badger is independent and withdrawn from society, but not to an unhealthy degree. His home is just what it ought to be: It was there long before he was born, and it has endured through generations. He enjoys stability and respect within his community. Content at home, Badger doesn’t yearn for the Wide World.
For most of the novel, Rat is sensible. He doesn’t seek out dangerous adventures unnecessarily, but enjoys uncovering new forms of natural beauty in his travels on the river. He’s highly sensitive to the grand context in which all individual lives are situated as interlocking and interdependent characters in a greater story. He searches for deeper meaning in the world around him, finding joy in composing poetry reflective of the beauty he finds.
When, at one point in the book, he meets a Seafaring Rat who inspires in him an envy of those who spend their lives roaming the Wide World, Rat feverishly makes preparations to leave. Mole, catching him on his way out the door, notices that Rat is unlike himself. His eyes are “not his friend’s eyes.” Mole recognizes that Rat is driven not by a genuine call to some far-off place like the migrating swallows are, but by restlessness and self-forgetfulness. Mole reminds Rat of who he is, speaking to him of the beauty of his own land and urging Rat to write poetry. These comments bring Rat back to himself.
While the book begins with one character’s successful venturing forth from home, it transitions to the story of Toad, who recklessly follows every passing whim and vagary in quest of adventure. Entirely unlike Badger’s stability and endurance, Toad forgets his lavish, comfortable home and the good things he enjoys. He focuses on what he doesn’t have. His fascination with motorcars leads him, in a contrast to Mole’s story, on an unsuccessful quest for fulfillment beyond his proper sphere. Toad’s story is that of a Ulysses who is entirely too satisfied with his own wit, cleverly escaping from dangerous situations in which he embroils himself.
As he makes one narrow escape after another, wildly fleeing from jail cell to train to river barge, Toad eventually finds himself yearning for home only to find on returning there that his house has been overrun by creatures from the Wild Wood. Like Ulysses on returning home to his native Ithaca, Toad must reclaim his home with the help of his friends, who show the importance of having a community to depend on.
Longing Takes Many Forms
As Chris Wheeler wrote in his article, “What the Wind Goes Whispering: An Exploration of Longing in ‘The Wind in the Willows,’” the book explores three longings. The most prominent two are “being home” and “going abroad.” Wheeler wrote,“These twin longings are for all of us. The longing to go, the longing to stay—they war within us as only they can, within those who live in the tension between pilgrimage and home. We are set in a place designed to be our home, but marred by our willfulness.”
Mole shows how this tension is partially resolved: After leaving home for a time, he returns and sees everything with new eyes, more consciously aware of those things “which had long been unconsciously a part of him.” He recognizes the value of home as providing one with “anchorage in one’s existence.” Even so, he recognizes that for a time he is called to the upper world and that now he must “return to the larger stage” of his newfound community and to “the sun and air and all they offered him.”
The third longing that anchors the other two is for an eternal Homeland that would provide permanent stability within a never-ending adventure. Rat’s recognition of this longing propels him to search for glimpses of eternal beauty in nature, perceiving moments of beauty as snatches of a song we’ll never hear in its entirety on earth. Like a true poet, he helps Mole, in one particular moment, perceive beauty and to more keenly feel awe and wonder as they glide down the river. Rat says, “This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me. ... Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him.”
Unable to fully describe their encounter with beauty, the two feel as though they have encountered a great Presence that inspires “a longing that is pain.” Intuitively, Rat senses that this longing can’t be fulfilled in this world.
We see that our attempts to fulfill this longing bring us closer to a complete understanding of what we were created for. Wheeler writes,
“Grahame unfolds for us here a sense of Someone beyond these animals who not only sustains and protects them, but creates unimaginable beauty to draw them to himself. This Someone’s parting gift to them is the grace of forgetfulness—that rather than remember the fullest longing they have yet received and pine away for heavenly reality, the fullness of it would pass from their minds and linger only in whispers in the reeds.”
In the midst of these longings, when we’re in danger of feeling empty and yearning too intensely, we can find renewal and peace in gratitude. To this end, our friends can remind us of the beauty of our lives to which we’re momentarily blinded. They can reorient us and recall us to ourselves when we lose ourselves to comparison. Thusly anchored, even when yearning for something beyond ourselves, we can endeavor to lead a life well-lived, whether at home or abroad.
