Our childhoods pass obscure judgements on us. Looking at a picture of oneself as a child, who does not hear a faint whisper say: ‘This is what you were; and look at who you have become’? We always let down the unstated promise inherent in our childhood. But we are not sure in what way. The failure eludes us somehow.
Childhood seems to promise so much, much that is unspecified. An eternal twinge of failure awaits the person who can meet, in spirit, the child that they were. For childhood seems to say that anything is possible, and that the golden ages can be incarnate in our time, within those lustrous eyes. And then the child becomes the person you are, here, now. Whoever you may be.
How fallen are the promises, how lowly are the glories!
Childhood is the enchanted judgement on the world, on society, and what we have let it become.
Childhood is the father and mother of humanity. In its mysterious estate lie our greatest secrets, our hopes, our redemption, the cures to our malaise.
Childhood is humanity’s secret. If you want to understand a nation study the way it treats its children, the way it educates them, the way it moulds them. Study the children themselves. Are they suspicious of the other? Then, for all their guises and civility, so are their parents. Then so is society. Are the children open to the other, to differences? Then more so are their parents, their society.
Children are the true thoughts of their nation, their class, their religion – the true thoughts untrammelled by diplomacy, politeness, politics, and hypocrisy.
Children betray the true nature of families. They reveal them. Or they redeem them. Children show what is good, what is true, what is pure, what is striven for, and what is natural in nations, and in families.
Childhood, paradoxically, is the future of all, not just its past. All great things incline us towards a higher childhood. Atlantis lives on in our imagination, and much can be learned from it. Eden has been transmuted into a future destination, made by our collective will and secret hopes, shaped by our hearts that yearn for a world where the unsuspected genius within us can live and unfold.
Childhood is the great puzzle, the marvellous symbol, the emblem of the quintessence, the magic mirror, the little grail, the missing key to our future.
This is why the childhood of literature is so important. Those early tales and fables can, at best, reveal to us our true, hidden, forgotten selves. It tells us who we are, and why. It dispels the shadows of the past. It shines a light on society. It brings back into our increasingly arid and closed minds the magic that dreams sometimes have. It makes some forgotten joy tremble in us. It makes us want to dream again, be free again, and to reach for childhood’s elusive promise of a beautiful self. It makes us want to transform the world, and to be happy.
With the best writing about childhood something else happens. The world is made new. Fables become real. Reality becomes fabulous. Time and space are revealed as illusions. A vaster power flows through one’s being. One senses that one can fly. For a magic moment all things are possible. Why not? The mind conceiving them makes them real. Childhood is about discovery. We rediscover the world, and are tempted to begin the grander journey of self-discovery. Then the closed circle becomes open again…
Novalis puts it beautifully. ‘Where children are, there is a golden age.’ Childhood is the golden age of humanity, invented in retrospect, with wonder woven in.
Through certain artists flows the childhood of the world, the forgotten angles, the golden ages of the spirit. In their best works we catch glimpses of the wondrous kingdom that childhood hints at. And we know that what we have glimpsed is not magic, or art, or enchantment. We know, in some obscure way, that the kingdom is real. This is what haunts us for ever.
O childhood, O initiation and birthplace of the world. You are the acorn, the seed, the ocean, the crossroads of past and future, the meeting place of lives; where what was is almost forgotten, and where what will be is seen ‘as through a glass, darkly’.
O childhood, elixir of time
And of flowers;
O childhood, where are those
Lost, serene hours?