The Child is the Father of the Man

 

Now the experiences I just wrote about only live as memory. I doubt I could be fully present in such experiences should I be confronted with something similar. In fact, I have taken my boys to a pond in a wooded area between Potsdam and Wannsee, where there is a frog pond, perhaps subconsciously trying to connect them to my childhood experiences. But I could not respond that way. It seems that I could only draw on my memories. But I am not sure about that.

  I think of Wordsworth's “Ode to Immorality,” a poem that I have returned to again and again since I first read it as a young student. Though I am not going to give a close reading now, I will print the poem here, italicizing the part that I am especially thinking of now.

 

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood 

   The child is father of the man;

And I could wish my days to be

   Bound each to each by natural piety.

          (Wordsworth, "My Heart Leaps Up")

 

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.

 

                      The Rainbow comes and goes,

                      And lovely is the Rose,

                      The Moon doth with delight

       Look round her when the heavens are bare,

                      Waters on a starry night

                      Are beautiful and fair;

       The sunshine is a glorious birth;

       But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

 

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,

       And while the young lambs bound

                      As to the tabor's sound,

To me alone there came a thought of grief:

A timely utterance gave that thought relief,

                      And I again am strong:

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;

No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;

I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,

       The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,

                      And all the earth is gay;

                           Land and sea

                Give themselves up to jollity,

                      And with the heart of May

                 Doth every Beast keep holiday;—

                      Thou Child of Joy,

Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.

 

Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call

      Ye to each other make; I see

The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;

      My heart is at your festival,

            My head hath its coronal,

The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.

                      Oh evil day! if I were sullen

                      While Earth herself is adorning,

                         This sweet May-morning,

                      And the Children are culling

                         On every side,

In a thousand valleys far and wide,

                      Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,

And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:—

                      I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!

                      —But there's a Tree, of many, one,

A single field which I have looked upon,

Both of them speak of something that is gone;

                      The Pansy at my feet

                      Doth the same tale repeat:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

 

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.

 

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;

Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,

                      And, even with something of a Mother's mind,

                      And no unworthy aim,

The homely Nurse doth all she can

To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,

                      Forget the glories he hath known,

And that imperial palace whence he came.

 

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,

A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!

See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,

Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,

With light upon him from his father's eyes!

See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,

Some fragment from his dream of human life,

Shaped by himself with newly-learn{e}d art

                      A wedding or a festival,

                      A mourning or a funeral;

                         And this hath now his heart,

                      And unto this he frames his song:

                         Then will he fit his tongue

To dialogues of business, love, or strife;

                      But it will not be long

                      Ere this be thrown aside,

                      And with new joy and pride

The little Actor cons another part;

Filling from time to time his "humorous stage"

With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,

That Life brings with her in her equipage;

                      As if his whole vocation

                      Were endless imitation.

 

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie

                      Thy Soul's immensity;

Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep

Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,

Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—

                      Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!

                      On whom those truths do rest,

Which we are toiling all our lives to find,

In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;

Thou, over whom thy Immortality

Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,

A Presence which is not to be put by;

Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might

Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,

Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke

The years to bring the inevitable yoke,

Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?

Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,

And custom lie upon thee with a weight,

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

 

                      O joy! that in our embers

                      Is something that doth live,

                      That Nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benediction: not indeed

For that which is most worthy to be blest;

Delight and liberty, the simple creed

Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—

                      Not for these I raise

                      The song of thanks and praise

                But for those obstinate questionings

                Of sense and outward things,

                Fallings from us, vanishings;

                Blank misgivings of a Creature

Moving about in worlds not realised,

High instincts before which our mortal Nature

Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:

                      But for those first affections,

                      Those shadowy recollections,

                Which, be they what they may

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,

Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;

                Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,

                To perish never;

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,

                      Nor Man nor Boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

Can utterly abolish or destroy!

                Hence in a season of calm weather

                      Though inland far we be,

Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea

                      Which brought us hither,

                Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the Children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

 

Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!

                      And let the young Lambs bound

                      As to the tabor's sound!

We in thought will join your throng,

                      Ye that pipe and ye that play,

                      Ye that through your hearts to-day

                      Feel the gladness of the May!

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

                Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

                      We will grieve not, rather find

                      Strength in what remains behind;

                      In the primal sympathy

                      Which having been must ever be;

                      In the soothing thoughts that spring

                      Out of human suffering;

                      In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,

Forebode not any severing of our loves!

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;

I only have relinquished one delight

To live beneath your more habitual sway.

I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,

Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;

The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

                      Is lovely yet;

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;

Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

 

. . .

 Long poem. Now I want to think the experience at the pond over the course of my life through the lens of this deep meditation. My childhood self at the pond did not stand at a reflective distance from experience. He simply inhabited it. The wonder, the fascination, the horror, all were immediate. My adult self remembers. And memory is a peculiar thing. Modern thought often treats memory as merely a record of a past psychological state. But Wordsworth treats it as something more. Memory can preserve and deepen a disclosure that is no longer immediately available.

    Wordsworth is one of the great philosophers of wonder. What he calls the "vision splendid" is very close to what I have been describing: a child's immediate encounter with the world before it is overlaid with abstraction, utility, and self-consciousness. My own description of the pond made me think of Wordsworth: the fascination with living things, the absorption in the natural world, attention rather than control, the sense that reality is somehow richer than ordinary adult consciousness allows. The pond was a world.

      In the poem, Wordsworth does not deny that something has been lost. Quite the contrary. The child's immediacy has vanished: "There hath past away a glory from the earth." But the poem does not end in loss. Reflection, memory, suffering, and maturity yield another kind of access: 

I only have relinquished one delight

To live beneath your more habitual sway.

I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,

Even more than when I tripped lightly as they 

Suppose tomorrow I witnessed another act of cruelty to an animal. I suspect that I would not experience it exactly as the child did. My response would be mediated by memory, a biography (not always an easy one as with most people), philosophy, literature, decades of reflection, etc. But that does not necessarily mean the response would be less authentic. It would be a different mode of access. The child saw. The adult remembers what he saw and tries to understand it. In some respects, that is precisely the movement Cordner describes when he speaks of deepening one's sense of an experience rather than abandoning it for theory. 

. . . 

There is a danger of idealizing the child. The child possesses immediacy, which is to say, an experience without things like memory, philosophy, literature, and the wounds of a never-easy adult life. But the child often lacks understanding. The adult, if things go well, if you are not as unfortunate as someone like Trump, possesses some modicum of understanding. But often lacks immediacy. Wordsworth's insight is to see that the task is neither to remain a child nor to dismiss childhood. It is to allow memory to become a source of understanding. The remembered experience becomes authoritative not because it was childhood, but because it continues to make sense of something that matters. The authority of the frog memory does not seem to derive from its emotional intensity. Many childhood experiences are intense and later prove misleading. Its authority derives from the fact that fifty years of reflection have not dissolved it – to the contrary, the experience has become more intelligible. 

      There is a beautiful passage in another of Wordsworth's poems, The Prelude, where he speaks of "spots of time" i.e., certain experiences that acquire greater significance as life unfolds. They become sources of nourishment for the imagination and understanding long after the original event is gone. I wonder whether the pond and the frog have become one of my "spots of time" inasmuch as they shed light on questions about life, cruelty, wonder, attention, reality, the relation between meaning and truth. The child no longer exists. The pond is gone. The frog is gone. The experience survives only as memory, one that will die when I die. But the memory is not merely a record of the experience. Much more, it is one of the places where reality first disclosed itself to me, and where, even now, I continue to return in order to understand what was disclosed there. That I take from Wordsworth’s poem, and I think also from Cordner. The reality is not hidden behind the appearance. It is disclosed through a deepening of what was first seen. The child saw it immediately; the adult spends a lifetime learning what he saw. 

. . . 

  Here is a metaphor rather than a poem, to help think about the same thing. I will quote C. S. Lewis from his “Three Ways to Write for Children,” where he defends his adult love of fantasy literature and fairy tales against a “modern view.” 

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? I now like hock, which I am sure I should not have liked as a child. But I still like lemon-squash. I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, I now have two. But if I had to lose the taste for lemon-squash before I acquired the taste for hock, that would not be growth but simple change. I now enjoy Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Trollope as well as fairy tales and I call that growth: if I had had to lose the fairy tales in order to acquire the novelists, I would not say that I had grown but only that I had changed. A tree grows because it adds rings: a train doesn’t grow by leaving one station behind and puffing on to the next. In reality, the case is stronger and more complicated than this. I think my growth is just as apparent when I now read the fairy tales as when I read the novelists, for I now enjoy the fairy tales better than I did in childhood; being now able to put more in, of course I get more out. [emphasis mine]

 I like Lewis's metaphor better than Wordsworth's poem in one important respect. Wordsworth can be taken to mean that maturity is largely compensation for a loss. Childhood possesses a glory that can never fully return - assuming of course the child is loved and has what it needs. Lewis's image of the tree rings suggests something different. The earlier layers remain. They are not discarded but incorporated. The mature tree is not the sapling minus the sapling. It is the sapling grown larger. The inner rings are still there. Without them, the tree could not exist.

     That strikes me as a more hopeful image but perhaps it only describes the fortunate few, to whom Lewis and Tolkien certainly belonged. The child still lived in them. I would wish that the child at the pond is not someone I have left behind. Of course, I would not want to try to become that child again. He is one of the inner rings of the person who now reflects philosophically on those experiences. The man thinking depends upon the child. Without the child's wonder, the adult's philosophy becomes abstract. Without the adult's reflection, the child's wonder remains inarticulate. The two belong together.

     This also helps with the question of memory. The goal is not to recover the exact immediacy of childhood. That may be impossible. The task is to remain faithful to what was disclosed in childhood while bringing to it the resources of maturity. The child sees. The adult understands. Or better: the child sees something real. The adult spends a lifetime trying to understand what was seen. This is one reason I think my frog story has such philosophical significance for me. It is one of the places where a fundamental orientation toward reality became visible. Wonder before life. Horror before callousness. A sense that meaning belongs to the world and is not merely projected onto it. I think that is not an achievement but a form of grace. In religious language, I would say it relates me to God, the Creator.    The later rings of my tree have not replaced those experiences. They have grown around them. They are attempts to understand what was already there. Religiously, perhaps, attempts to understand God the Creator (that is, Christ, through whom all things were created)? 

     Lewis's metaphor intimates a reply to my worry that the experience now survives only as memory and the dangers of distortion. The rings of a tree are constitutive of the tree's present being. Likewise, those experiences may be among the things that continue to shape how I see the world now. The child who cared for the frogs, recoiled from the syringe, and felt uneasy before the formaldehyde specimen is still there as one of the layers through which the adult man trying to make sense continues to encounter reality.

Lewis, C. S. "On Three Ways of Writing for Children." On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature, edited by Walter Hooper, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, pp. 31–43.