Childhood and Adulthood

 Paul James is moving closer and closer to the cliff, from which we must all either jump or fall, away from childhood, falling all through our teenage years, and hopefully landing on new ground, on an honorable adulthood. I’m having to deal with it. We once read Jostein Gaardner’s Through a Glass, Darkly. The angel Ariel tells Cecilia that Adam and Eve were children. What good is a garden with no children to run and play in it. Adults exist for the sake of children – of making more children to experience the beauty and wonder of creation. Most adults lose that capacity, and so become uninteresting. Children are close to angels, who are also innocent (unless fallen, I guess) and thus capable of joy and wonder. I also listened again to Neil Young’s song “Sugar Mountain”: 

Oh to live on Sugar Mountain

With the barkers and the colored balloons

You can't be twenty on Sugar Mountain

Though you're thinking that you're leaving there too soon

You're leaving there too soon

 

Wordsworth’s Ode has long held nearly scriptural status for me: 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

       The earth, and every common sight,

                          To me did seem

                      Apparelled in celestial light,

            The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

                      Turn wheresoe'er I may,

                          By night or day.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

                            ...

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,                    

 Hath had elsewhere its setting,                        

 And cometh from afar:

 Not in entire forgetfulness,                      

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away

And fade into the light of common day.

     

      All this speaks directly to my heart, and I feel it all points to an important life-truth. I honestly believe that if the child dies, the soul dies, or at least becomes seriously ill. Growing up can’t be bad, but I can say this only if the child-like capacity of joy and wonder, and that special longing for “I know not what” somehow survives puberty and adulthood. I see it as almost Satanic, my society’s will to cut the teen off from their childhood – through the cult of “cool” (defined as anti-child), its raw sexual music, its cynical films targeted at teen audiences, etc. The whole of what Christopher Lasch called “the culture of narcissism” is premised on what Neil Postman called “the death of childhood.” Such societal dysfunction makes me feel just like Neil Young or the angel Ariel – leaving childhood is leaving paradise; is entering a fallen, sinful world. I also know it can be like that; that if Satan exists, that precisely would be what he would wish for human life.    

    But this is too bleak for me to live with without qualification. In its pure form, it does the dirt on life. The inner circles of the growing tree may be the most pure, the cleanest, the strongest. But the outer rings may also draw goodness from the soil of the earth (Creation). Every stage of life can be good – adding onto, not substituted for, childhood. C. S. Lewis is my teacher here, and he gets the thought just right when he is talking about his taste in literature: 

I never met The Wind in the Willows or the Bastable books till I was in my late twenties, and I do not think I have enjoyed them any the less on that account. I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz. . . . Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things?

 

As so often, I read Lewis and see a truth that seems so obvious, and yet somehow it had always just eluded me. The child in us must live. But every other stage of life, connected to and nourished by the previous stages, are also part of the Creation, and thus “good, very good.” I will end with a song that understands this, The Circle, by Joni Mitchell. 

                       So the years spin by and now the boy is 20

                       Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true

                       There'll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty

                       Before the last revolving year is through

                       And the seasons, they go round and round

                       And the painted ponies go up and down

                       We're captive on the carousel of time

                       We can't return, we can only look

                       Behind, from where we came

                       And go round and round and round, in the circle game.

We can't stay children forever, especially children that never learned to educate and control their desires. But if the child in us dies as we age, something of our soul also dies.