When you’re a child parents are omnipotent. They stride through your life and seem somehow to be the cause of all that takes place. It gets dark because because they say it’s time for bed. To be a child is to have a fabulously constricted awareness, one through which all of reality must squeeze. Naturally reality suffers a flattening, but also a purification.
This is because the constriction works like a pinhole camera: everything a child sees takes on the crispness of a world without depth. The nearest dog is The Dog. The fear of the unfinished attic is Fear Itself. The spinning lump in your throat, the spasming frown, the boiling tears, the wrack and soreness of one’s self being pushed aside as your body becomes a nameless chute for rage, or for sadness—this is The Feeling.
We write our dictionaries of the world in this way. And however clinical its definitions later become each entry begins with whatever was to hand. These objects or experiences were pressed so deeply into our childhood’s mind as to render its every imperfection deliberate and its every coincidence, law. This is the world as we make it.
Each of us is born into a world that makes absolute sense because the sense of things is, for the last time in our lives, exactly equal to our own powers of understanding. We have first crack at all mysteries and no time to revise.
And everyone knows what happens next. Each child’s world, unique because every person is unrepeatable, is crushed to dust all of the same size. These particles disappear or are pressed into bricks, as accident and education dictate. And the grown person awakens from the vividness of childhood, full of objectivity but emptied of certainty.
We all remember this, if not exactly in these terms, and spend the rest of our lives trying to make ourselves, or the world, smaller. Most of adulthood’s pleasures hunt the narrowness of childhood: the constriction of mind during orgasm to an aperture so tight that thoughts must enter single file, a drug’s rush that washes off adulthood’s wider awarenesses—awarenesses like future time, which we fill with tasks; or past time, where regrets and damages are listed behind our names like inverted qualifications. The rush that cancels fear, the fear that others see these damages and see us as the sum of them.
But then, the rare people whose humbleness before the adult world’s unswallowable scale allows them to see this world as children. To these people every streetlamp has something interesting to reveal, if only it is paid the same furious attention that time paid when it lavished the object with injuries, character, individuality. These people retain within themselves the most brilliant fact of childhood, which is certainty.
I think the world will have us humble, and whether we get there in the teeth of fear is up to us.
izzy806
amandla
dailybridgerton
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