Childhood ought to terrify us with gentle wonder. It ought to make us feel curiously humble. It has in it something akin to genius: there is simply no accounting for its everlasting appeal, its unfathomability.
I am speaking here of an aspect of childhood that lingers in the depths of the mind, like an imperishable melody. I am not speaking here of the other aspects of spoilt or conditioned or wretched childhoods that can be seen in nasty little boys or horrid little girls. I speak of the childhood seen out of the corner of the eye. I speak of the conjunction of its uncoordination and its magic, its serenity and its confusions. I speak of its multiple perspective. Its freedom, its lack of freedom.
That is why childhood also has something sad about it. For childhood is the place where tyranny rules absolutely, and of necessity. The child is moulded. That is the beginning of its fall, the loss of its Eden. To the child the world is named, explained, mis-explained, seamed with errors, made smaller, made plainer, made too complicated, narrowed, filled with suspicion, dogma, superstition and envy. Wonder is driven out from the world. Mystery is chased away from the fabric of reality. The tendency to ask questions is turned into a tendency to assume. The inclination to trust is warped into an inclination to fear. Flexibility is misrepresented as weakness. Sensitivity is distorted into timidity. The child is shaped; or should one say misshaped. Its open nature is closed off; its river canalised; its mind trapped; its spirit caged; its playfulness made forced; its joys made suspect; its laughter imprisoned.
The child should be shaped open, should be taught to value all peoples, to respect all races and creeds. But the child is taught to be suspicious of difference. A flower is thus changed into a thorn, a river into a brook, a garden into a wasteland.
The child is enveloped in the forms of a particular culture, when it could also be opened out to be at home in the world, with all its diversity. For when the child is born, it is born not into the ghetto, the palace, the villa but into the world, the open world. The child is born into the world of men and women, history and dreams, the limited and the limitless, the backyard and the sky. The child is born into an inheritance of all books, all thoughts, all the music and art and science that have been created in the perpetual pilgrimage of humanity along the dusty roads of time.
Childhood is the only time when the mind is so free, when fairies are as real as fires, when fables are true and reality is constantly invented. The world is a dream. And then the snake creeps in. Slowly corruption creeps in too, and the dream dies.
Hemingway writes somewhere of rich men and women in their yachts who weep at night because they can’t sleep as purely as they did when they were children. More controversially, Blake writes that education is a sin. ‘Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.’
Some people loathe their childhood because they were betrayed by it. I know of childhoods so severe, brutalised, and poverty-stricken that it’s a wonder the children didn’t become mass murderers. They turned out relatively sane. This is a continuing marvel. Even in the hardest of people there lurks something of childhood’s elusive twilight. It may be distorted, but it is there. It comes out in what these hard people love, what they are sentimental about, or even, paradoxically, in what they hate.