Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm

Review

**SECTION ONE — Bookstore recommendation** Charlie Mackesy's *Always Remember* is a companion volume to his widely read *The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse*, returning to the same four characters now caught in a storm together. The premise is spare: the boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse move through darkness and wind, speaking to one another in short, handwritten sentences about fear, worth, and the strange mercy of not being alone. Mackesy's illustrations — ink and watercolor, loose and unhurried — carry as much weight as the words. The book is addressed to anyone who has felt lost or frightened and doubted whether they were worth rescuing. Its central argument is that asking for help takes courage, that kindness is the most practical thing, and that belonging to others is not a reward for being well but the condition for surviving being unwell. The audience is broad: it will sit on a child's shelf or an adult's nightstand with equal ease. **SECTION TWO — Catholic anthropological reading** - **Created**: The mole's unembarrassed delight in cake, the horse's steady warmth, the fox's watchful presence — each character embodies a distinct natural goodness. Mackesy does not earn these qualities through plot; they are simply what the characters are. This matches the CCMMP's first premise about the Created state: goodness precedes achievement, and dignity is given, not constructed. - **Fallen**: The fox arrives in the story as the figure of fear-driven isolation, slow to trust, reluctant to be seen. His gradual opening toward the others is the book's clearest picture of the wounded condition — concupiscence expressed not as appetite run wild but as appetite turned inward, closing the self against relationship as a form of self-protection. - **Redeemed**: The horse carries the boy through the storm. This single image — a stronger creature bearing a smaller one without resentment or transaction — is the book's gesture toward restoration. The limitation is that the restoration remains horizontal: it is the horse, not grace, that saves. The Redeemed state in the CCMMP requires a transcendent source for genuine healing, and Mackesy's framework stops at friendship. - **Prudence (docility)**: The boy asks questions throughout. He does not pretend to know the way. Aquinas treats docility — the willingness to be taught — as an integral part of prudence, and the boy's posture of receptive questioning is a small but accurate picture of how practical wisdom actually forms: through the willingness to remain a learner in the company of those who see more clearly. - **Justice (friendliness)**: Mackesy's characters do not perform friendship; they practice it as a steady habit. The mole checks on the boy. The horse waits. The fox stays. Aquinas distinguishes the virtue of friendliness (affabilitas) from mere sociability precisely on the grounds of consistency — it is the disposition to communicate genuine goodwill in ordinary encounters, not only in moments of feeling warmly inclined. The book depicts this well. **SECTION THREE — Conversation with the canon** Augustine's *Confessions* [^1] offers the sharpest contrast available: where Mackesy's boy finds rest in the company of the horse, Augustine's restlessness is resolved only in the One for whom the heart was made — friendship is the vehicle of Augustine's journey, not its destination. The structural difference matters: Mackesy's anthropology is warm and true as far as it goes, but it ends where Augustine's begins. ## References [^1]: Augustine. (n.d.). *The Confessions of St. Augustine*. Book One.

✓ Strengths

• ✓The book affirms the dignity of the person-in-relationship by portraying companionship through a storm as the condition under which the deepest truths about self-worth and belonging are spoken aloud — a concrete depiction of the social nature of the human person.
• ✓Mackesy's recurring theme that asking for help is an act of courage, not weakness, directly counters the disordered self-sufficiency that Aquinas identifies as a distortion of the irascible appetite — the refusal of legitimate dependence on others.
• ✓The horse's consistent willingness to carry the boy through the storm models the virtue of generosity as a stable disposition, not a sporadic feeling — a distinction Aquinas draws between virtue as habitus and mere emotional impulse.
• ✓The book's repeated insistence that the characters are enough as they are, even in their lostness, gestures toward the Created state: original goodness that precedes achievement, a dignity that suffering cannot annul.
• ✓The fox's gradual movement from fear-driven isolation toward tentative trust traces a recognizable arc of purgation: the slow loosening of concupiscent self-protection.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠The book's anthropology is incomplete at the Redeemed state: the healing it points toward is immanent — warmth, friendship, presence — without any transcendent horizon. Readers may absorb a therapy-inflected account of flourishing that stops short of grace as the actual source of restoration.
• ⚠The affirmations of unconditional self-worth, while pastorally resonant, are unanchored. Without a grounding in the imago Dei or any account of why the person has dignity, the book risks reinforcing a sentimentalized self-esteem framework that Vitz, in Psychology as Religion, identifies as a secular substitute for genuine theological anthropology.
• ⚠The storm functions as the central metaphor for suffering but is never differentiated: it is unclear whether the storm is an external trial, an interior desolation, or the consequence of fault. This conflation matters pastorally, because the appropriate response to each differs, and the book offers the same warm companionship as the answer to all three.