Skip to main content

The Romance called Childhood


Put a few children on an island with no adults to supervise them.  Watch from a distance what they do.  In no time you will have to intervene in order to save them from themselves.

William Golding wrote a novel on that theme.  Lord of the Flies, the novel by the Nobel laureate, tells the story of some children who were marooned on an island.  Soon savagery dominates their life.  The benign Ralph loses to the bullying Jack.  Evil triumphs.  There is no childhood innocence.   There is only the savagery that marks humanity essentially.

Three years before Lord of the Flies was published, American literature was blessed with J D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1954) which told the story of a 16 year-old boy, Holden Caulfield, whose dream was to preserve children’s innocence from the necessary corruption of adults.  Holden ends up in the loony bin. 

One has to lose innocence if one is to remain sane in the human world.  Growing up is necessarily to embrace evil or at least grapple with it.  There is no escape.  When you die, as Holden tells us in the novel, people will come and put “a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday.”  When you are alive, all they give you is crap.  Holden detested people.  And the psychiatrist thought he was insane.  After a year’s treatment in the asylum, Holden could not begin to love people.  But he was willing to accept their limitations.

Holden didn’t grow up, in short.  Did that help him anyway?  Not at all.  Accepting that human nature is essentially more evil than good is important in the process of growing up.  Childhood innocence is a good romantic notion.  It does no good to anyone trying to make it a gospel.  The harsh reality is that we can only grow up to evil or at least grappling with it; there is no way to grow down to childlike innocence.  The harsh truth is that there is nothing like childlike innocence.  Unless you keep the child locked away from the world of men!

As poet Gerard Manley Hopkins told the little girl Margaret, “as the heart grows older / It will come to such sights colder.”  Margaret has to grow up and learn the sorrows that accompany human existence.  There is no growing down.


PS. Inspired by the latest Indispire theme: "You will find more happiness growing down than up". Do you wish to relive your childhood? #nostalgia
Indian Bloggers


Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniJuly 17, 2016 at 4:35 PM

    I love all of your posts, but this one,so far, is the best post that I have read. I relate with what you have said. I have a belief that maturity comes with experiences. And experiences are the best teachers to show the child in us a pragmatic look of the world outside.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 17, 2016 at 5:24 PM

      Experiences are the best teachers. And more often than not, they teach us harsh truths.

      Delete
  2. sunaina sharmaJuly 17, 2016 at 4:42 PM

    Hopkins lines are so apt....we grow old and we find coldness in relationships everywhere, partly because we have lost the passion of childhood.....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 17, 2016 at 5:27 PM

      One of my favorite poems by Hopkins, it shows the inevitability of evil in human life. Man is a "fallen" creature, as Hopkins - a Catholic priest - understood.

      Delete
  3. Alok singhalJuly 17, 2016 at 9:58 PM

    The world makes us do things which we ourselves never imagined. It's all corrupt practices around us that we get infected with!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 18, 2016 at 5:56 AM

      True. When there's so much evil all around survival depends on acquiring some of that.

      Delete
  4. Durga Prasad DashJuly 18, 2016 at 7:00 AM

    Yes that is true. But in growing up in an evil world, in becoming mature and losing innocence so much of the spontaneity is lost.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 18, 2016 at 7:35 AM

      Inevitable loss. That's why we come across so many people who can't even smile.

      Delete
  5. Anupam PatraJuly 18, 2016 at 9:31 AM

    The freedoms of childhood are best recalled in the confines of adulthood Tomichan, but then that confine is the one we have built for one another. As you have quoted variously, there is no escaping that fence. This was a good read.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 18, 2016 at 10:09 AM

      Freedom has to be accompanied with responsibility. We are like children insofar as we behave without responsibility. The confines are necessary because of that lingering childhood.

      Delete
  6. Deepali AdhikaryJuly 18, 2016 at 10:20 AM

    "One has to lose innocence if one is to remain sane in the human world" - harsh but true.I wish, however, there was some other way. Side-effects of being a parent, I guess.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 18, 2016 at 1:56 PM

      I too wish there was some other way. We can't have Rishisringas!

      Delete
  7. IraJuly 18, 2016 at 12:50 PM

    Childhood is free of notions and speculations but as we start aging the exposure to the world and society makes us adapt to the world and the quest of survival brings harsh changes to befit the world.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 18, 2016 at 1:59 PM

      William Golding would say that even if adults are not around, the children will still make a hell out of whatever is available to them.

      Delete
  8. Swati BatraJuly 18, 2016 at 3:05 PM

    Time ones gone never comes back. So is childhood. no matter how hard we try, at some point we all knowingly or unknowingly fall prey to evils.

    ReplyDelete
  9. UnknownJuly 20, 2016 at 12:18 PM

    Experience sure is a good teacher.Nice article

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 20, 2016 at 7:12 PM

      Experience may be a painful teacher but a pretty good one. Glad you liked it.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Dharma and Destiny

  Illustration by Copilot Designer Unwavering adherence to dharma causes much suffering in the Ramayana . Dharma can mean duty, righteousness, and moral order. There are many characters in the Ramayana who stick to their dharma as best as they can and cause much pain to themselves as well as others. Dasharatha sees it as his duty as a ruler (raja-dharma) to uphold truth and justice and hence has to fulfil the promise he made to Kaikeyi and send Rama into exile in spite of the anguish it causes him and many others. Rama accepts the order following his dharma as an obedient son. Sita follows her dharma as a wife and enters the forest along with her husband. The brotherly dharma of Lakshmana makes him leave his own wife and escort Rama and Sita. It’s all not that simple, however. Which dharma makes Rama suspect Sita’s purity, later in Lanka? Which dharma makes him succumb to a societal expectation instead of upholding his personal integrity, still later in Ayodhya? “You were car...
28 comments
Read more