The Untethered Transcendence of John Lennon Illustrated

In 2017, illustrator Jean Jullien collaborated with Amnesty International to turn John Lennon’s iconic “Imagine” song into an illustrated children’s book.

That probably seems like a great idea to most kind-hearted humans who care at all about things like world peace and the future of humanity. While I do care about these things, I am generally a grinch, and when I picked up this book at the library, I was certain it was going to be a flop.

I was sure that Imagine was going to be the kind of project that well-intentioned adults create for themselves and then hoist on their poor children. After all, it’s adults who idolize John Lennon, and children need a hell of a lot of context to understand why this iconic song locked itself into the Western world’s heart so tightly. That context includes things like: what is heaven, why wouldn’t we want there to be one, what are nations, what is war, and the biggest one of all: what the heck is death (which adults can’t seem to answer very well for themselves, let alone for their offspring.)

Now that I’ve gotten all of that out of my system, allow me to reveal that reading this children’s book adaptation of “Imagine” moved me deeply, and I think it might even move the right kids, too.

On the first page, we see a man on a crowded subway. He looks disillusioned by something beyond his control. A pigeon with an olive branch in its mouth trots happily past him, which he does not appear to notice. Then we see the words:

Imagine there’s no heaven.

It’s easy if you try.

How familiar these words are to us. We would recognize them on any t-shirt or bumper sticker. How strange they must be to a child! To experience them, a child must first imagine a heaven, then must imagine that it does not exist, then must wonder if this is an easy thing to do or a difficult thing to do, and if it is a difficult thing to do, why? So much happens here on this first page! Life, death, self, other, up, down!

Then there is the scene. Why are we talking about heaven and non-heaven here at a subway stop? What’s up with this man? What’s up with this bird?

I imagine an adult reader presenting this first page to a child. They might be bit giddy, and misty, and maybe they can’t stop themselves from humming a little. The child on their lap must think, “How exciting!” As they mull the words and the images over in their head, everything starts to feel upside down. This is no ordinary book.

In a very strange way, this book achieves exactly the dismantled universe that Lennon proposes in his lyrics.

I’m not sure whether children would enjoy this untethered experience. I really do not know. But it’s certain that very is something very beautiful at work here, and I am so grateful to experience it at my ripe old age. I will return to it, as I have to the song, again and again.