Adam Gopnik’s recent New Yorker piece on G.K. Chesterton (whom I have not read) quotes from Chesterton’s autobiography, about the profound effect a puppet theatre had on him as a child:

The whole point is that I did like the toy theatre even when I knew it was a toy theatre. I did like the cardboard figures….The white light of wonder that shone on the whole business was not any sort of trick[.]

And Gopnik goes on to note that there is more than one way to regard that light, that “the credit we give the puppet show is the credit it deserves, that the wonder of it cannot be explained, up or down, but only experienced[.]”

One of the greatest joys of the puppet is that it’s not real, and it knows it’s not real. And yet it absolutely is, as is our own pleasure in both its artifice and its reality. The only trick is the one we allow ourselves to play on ourselves – as we do in any theatre, movies too: those flickering creatures up there aren’t really people after all, are they? – in any fictional world: strings, sticks, felt, velvet, pixels, light, shadows, nouns, verbs, it’s all set dressing, it’s costumes, it makes and unmakes and remakes the toy world before us, and places us squarely, while the light lasts, in that world, ourselves a toy.