Quote of the Day: Chris Van Allsburg on Time & Perspective

In the early 1980s, when home video games and cable television began shrinking attention spans into bite-size jolts, there was a countercurrent: a hunger for immersive worlds you could enter without being tracked, pinged, or interrupted. That tension feels even more urgent in 2026, when our days are chopped into notifications and feeds that refresh faster than memory. Against that backdrop, Chris Van Allsburg’s line lands like a quiet rebellion: “The opportunity to create a small world between two pieces of cardboard, where time exists yet stands still, where people talk and I tell them what to say, is exciting and rewarding.”

He’s describing a book not as a product, but as a sealed ecosystem. The “two pieces of cardboard” are humble, covers, yes, but also boundaries. Limits that make intensity possible. Inside them, time becomes elastic: it moves for the characters, yet waits faithfully for the reader. Close the cover and the world suspends, untouched by the chaos outside. Reopen it and the story resumes as if nothing intervened. That is the kind of permanence our digital lives rarely offer.

There’s also the bracing admission of control: “I tell them what to say.” It’s not tyranny; it’s responsibility. An author choreographs speech, motive, consequence. In an era when public language is increasingly automated, optimized, or outsourced, the deliberate crafting of dialogue becomes a form of leadership, a commitment to meaning over noise.

Chris Van Allsburg, the author-illustrator behind Jumanji and The Polar Express, has spent a career building portals that feel both ordinary and enchanted. His credibility comes from making wonder behave like a real place, with rules, shadows, and stakes.

On March 9, 2023, you didn’t need a headline to feel the churn: the world was already moving too fast. Van Allsburg’s reminder still applies, make or find a “small world” today, and treat sustained attention as an act of resilience.