October 3, 2025
I want to write about the strange, sad ritual of leaving childhood behind—and about the myth that it is a regrettable necessity. Of course we do grow older, yet childhood is not chronological but a state of mind. In leaving childhood for adulthood, what Blake called Innocence for what he called Experience, we are not following any law of nature but conforming to powerful social pressure. What parents and most of society do with childhood is to try to cure it. We call this “socialization.”
There are conservative and liberal approaches to socialization. The conservative version starts from the assumption that children, while of course lovable and all that, are inherently selfish, unconditionally demanding, and lacking in empathy.
Left to themselves, they would immediately begin enacting Lord of the Flies. In a Christian context, this goes back to the idea of original sin as articulated by theologians such as Augustine. Original sin is the sin of the origin, of Adam and Eve, whose result was a corruption of the will passed on to every newborn child like a spiritual version of a congenital illness. In his Confessions, Augustine scoffs at the idea of an innocent baby. Imagine the look of murderous hate on the face of a baby at the breast when his sibling approaches and wants to supplant him. Even without this religious justification, the idea that a child is a symbol of the natural goodness of human nature is to some thinkers a half-baked Rousseauism and a dangerous error, for children who are not socialized grow up to be narcissistic sociopaths. Children are “naturally” little “savages,” and need the firm hand of authority to teach them to control their inner impulses and obey external social rules. By this point, we can see that the rhetoric has acquired an ominous tone, and we begin to feel that there is something wrong with this argument. But it is still one that is accepted in circles who advocate “traditional family values,” the family being one that is ruled by patriarchal authority that extends also over women, for women are more “childish” than men, and therefore need controlling in the same way.
But even in a non-authoritarian context, there is an acceptance of the idea that childhood is a paradise that must be lost. However, any time we are presented with the argument that life consists of hard necessities to which we must submit, we should question it, and ask who it is that would profit from such a submission.
I know little of contemporary children’s and young adult literature, but would like to use what I do know, combined with the older literature for young people that I grew up on, to try to understand something about the end of childhood.
I did not raise children, but for almost 20 years I lived on an ample, semi-rural property where I watched generation after generation of baby animals, particularly baby groundhogs and raccoons, as they grew to maturity over the course of each summer. When people idealize childhood Innocence, they tend to portray it in terms of a gentle, passive sweetness. This is the opposite of the truth. What is childhood? Boundless energy, a vitality so exuberant that it leaps and soars—and plays. I miss the playing of the baby groundhogs and raccoons on my deck outside my kitchen windows. I have dozens of photos, as normal people have photos of their kids. The babies of both species love to wrestle with each other. One gets on top and pretends to bite their sibling’s head, only to be thrown off and end up on the bottom. Sometimes they are so excited that they fall off the deck onto the first stair—still wrestling. I used to put out a water dish (yes, I’m that eccentric) and invariably someone would decide it was a mini-wading pool and get into it with all four paws, and maybe even sit down, looking hilarious. So I bought a large, shallow plastic container and made it into a swimming pool, in which three or four furry creatures would venture at once while mama looked on with a patient, long-suffering look.
In my new apartment, no wildlife, alas—but I had the good fortune to rent the apartment across from the dog park, an area enclosed with a chain-link fence. Periodically I watch dogs, both puppies and older dogs, go wild with excitement when let off the leash, chasing a ball, chasing each other, barking excitedly, racing around until they tire out and flop down in the grass to recover.
This is childhood—energy unleashed. The energy is not always completely squelched. My current Shakespeare class is so lively that it sometimes takes me a minute to get their attention enough to start class. I told them explicitly: “You’re loud and rowdy. I love it. Keep it up. As a teacher, I can deal with this energy—I can channel it, with a certain amount of good will on your part.” What is hard is the kind of class whose deadness you can sense as you take attendance. These are students who have moved from Innocence to Experience.
A paradigmatic plot pattern in the young-people’s science fiction and fantasy I am familiar with essentially reproduces the pattern of the dog park: of being unleashed from the constraints of home life and setting out to have adventures in a world of wonders in which anything may happen. It is in fact a youthful version of the age-old pattern of the genre of romance. A common variety has been called the “portal fantasy” by the critic Farah Mendelsohn. The main character, possibly with friends for allies, goes through some kind of “portal” that is a nexus of realities, moving from the “real” world into an Otherworld, as I have called it, of strangeness and wonder. Adventures are had, and then there is a return. Among the best-known portal fantasies of our time are C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books and Harry Potter. Go through the back of a wardrobe or the wall of a train station and you enter a world that is literally magical. Somewhat earlier, in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s portal is a tornado, which takes her figuratively through what Blake called a Vortex, which turns her perspective and therefore her reality inside out.
But the pattern goes back at least to the 19th century. Alice goes through a looking glass into an Otherworld in which reality is reversed. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Treasure Island, young boys leave home for dangerous but exciting adventures with pirates and the like. Whether the Otherworld is a true world of marvels in which six impossible things may happen before breakfast or simply the “real” world portrayed as a place of adventure and possibility, as in Stevenson, and, for that matter, Huck Finn, the lesson of such fictions is initiatory. They portray leaving home and going off to have adventures as exciting and desirable. The world may be a hard place, but one should not fear it, because all sorts of wonderful things may happen. Home is good, but home is a place to be outgrown and willingly left. Blake has a lovely but tragic poem called The Book of Thel in which a young girl, Thel, lives in a kind of false paradise called the Vales of Har. She looks through the “Northern Gates” into the world of Experience, sees all of its sufferings and sorrows, and runs screaming back into the Vales of Har. But this is regressive, a desire to stay in the womb. We cannot be like Peter Pan. We are born biologically, but we must be born again psychologically, and children’s and young adult literature acts as a midwife, encouraging us to venture through the portal that is the figurative birth canal conducting us into a new and wider reality. Obeying an inner impulse, we are urged to crack the shell of the egg and spread our newfound wings in the sun. The ancestor of all these stories is the sub-genre of folktale we call the fairy tale. Psychologists like Bruno Bettelheim have shown that the perennial appeal of fairy tales lies in their initiatory function.
Fairy tales and their modern descendants offer children hope and encourage them to conquer their fears and move forward in life. Yes, it is hard to grow, hard to leave home and familiarity behind, and, yes, there are dangers and almost certain to be hardships, but you will not merely survive them—they will develop you, catalyze your growth by forcing you to call upon hidden resources that you may not even have known you possess. Sometimes that may turn out to be a gift for magic: in more realistic versions it may be latent gifts of courage and resourcefulness. Tolkien began not with children but with hobbits—imaginary creatures who are nevertheless childlike in their gentleness and peaceable nature. However, amiable as they are, their weakness is that they love comfort and familiarity a bit too much. Their burrows are wombs set in the earth. Both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins have to be forcibly ejected from their Vales-of-Har carefree life of ease in the Shire. Like Dante in The Divine Comedy, they are reluctant questers who have to be booted into action. But these unwilling conscripts eventually accomplish heroic deeds beyond those of the characters who actually have heroic aptitude.
In a way, some of the heroines and heroes of fairy tales are reluctant questers as well, leaving home either because they have been orphaned or because the home environment is toxic—or both. Orphans proliferate in Dickens: Oliver Twist, Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, Pip in Great Expectations, Esther Summerson in Bleak House. When a parent dies, the other parent may remarry for purposes of childcare, the typical result in traditional fairy tales being of course the “wicked stepmother,” who may bring into the family wicked children of her own, as in “Cinderella.” Dickens reverses the gender pattern in David Copperfield by having David’s mother marry the sadistic Mr. Murdstone. Luke Skywalker is an orphan in Star Wars, a fairy tale with science fiction trappings. Harry Potter of course is stuck with the Muggles on a periodic basis when Hogwarts is not in session. The heroes and heroines of young people’s tales may, in leaving home, find substitutes for inadequate parentage: sometimes symbolic parental figures, sometimes a peer group of allies. Harry Potter, for example, finds both: Dumbledore as well as Ron and Hermione. Given the number of dysfunctional families and destructive parents in the world, such literature for young people can provide hope of escaping what might seem to be an unending trap. There is a toughmindedness about a genre of literature that acknowledges that home may be a nightmare to escape from rather than a protective womb, and that the security even of good homes is fragile, and may suddenly disappear.
Even the best of homes are eventually outgrown. When the time comes, children have to leave. Part of the purpose of young adult literature has traditionally been to make the plunge into the adventure of adulthood exciting, playing upon young people’s natural desire to break the apron strings. I grew up in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. During that time, the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein wrote a whole series of what were then called “juveniles” rather than YA novels. I have been rereading them with considerable enjoyment. They are coming-of-age novels that encourage young people to be literally starry-eyed: they try to encourage a dream of space exploration as an adventure for vital young people to commit themselves to. You can say that they are preposterously unrealistic: until 1957, almost the end of Heinlein’s “juvenile” run, the United States had not even launched a satellite, let alone a manned rocket. But what Heinlein is urging young readers to do is to grow up and make it possible. Northrop Frye in his book on the Bible, The Great Code, argued that faith necessarily begins as faith in a fiction or illusion, in something that is not true—yet. Faith is committing yourself to that illusion and making it true. His example was the Wright brothers committing themselves to the age-old illusion that human beings could fly even though God has not given us wings, and imagining a way in which to make it come true.
Heinlein was doing the same thing. Critics tend to dismiss the first of the series, Rocket Ship Galileo, as exceptionally naive. In 1947, a Nobel-caliber physicist recruits three teenage boys into the project of building a ship that will land on the moon. It seems like absurd wish-fulfilment, but Heinlein, who was an engineer, works at solving the practical problems. The team does not work from scratch: they adapt the frame of a freight-carrying rocket, and it is guided by an early version of a computer. The physicist argues that it is up to private enterprise to accomplish this mission because neither government nor business would see any profit in it. And indeed, if it were not for the Cold War prompting a space race ten years after Rocket Ship Galileo, would there ever have been a space program?
Moreover, Heinlein was writing in the tradition of the lone American genius inventor, the Thomas Edison type. In the generation before Heinlein, starting in 1910, Victor Appleton III (a pseudonym) inaugurated a young-readers series in which the inventor was a youthful genius, Tom Swift, who came up with a marvelous new invention with every book. This series was succeeded in the next generation by the inventions and adventures of Tom Swift, Jr., Tom Swift’s 18-year-old son. I grew up on the Tom Swift, Jr. books in the 1950’s and still have 35 volumes of them. They and Heinlein’s juveniles encouraged young people to believe that the imagination might bring into being ways to better the world, at least if the imagination knew enough about differential equations. Because of them, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was in grade school. Within a few years, space was the new frontier in the words of John F. Kennedy, the final frontier in the words of Star Trek. Heinlein took the frontier myth seriously. He waxed eloquent in many books about how the human race is a restless, wandering species. The stars were going to be a new kind of Otherworld, a scientific realm of strangeness and wonder.
Since that time, space travel has been afflicted with exactly the kind of disillusionment we are talking about. First, the dream was kidnapped by Cold War militarist hysteria. Now that the Cold War is over, the billionaire business types are moving in. The claim is that space exploration is a difficult and hugely complex enterprise that necessarily costs billions of dollars and employs thousands of people. I wonder how much of that is capitalist and bureaucratic propaganda. Is scientific creativity really a huge collective effort? After all, where did the cybernetic revolution come from? From Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who singlehandedly invented the personal computer and smartphone as young inventors in their garages. Maybe Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have accomplished fairly little because they are not genius inventors, only corrupt and crazy businessmen. Heinlein urged young people to dream big and make it happen by solving the problems everyone insisted were impossible.
Heinlein’s young heroes come from positive families, but there is a repeated theme of the necessity of breaking family ties. A repeated character type is the clingy mother who tries to forbid her darling boy from going out and risking his life in some foolhardy venture. Usually she is a kind of scatterbrain too. But at least one of them comes around and accepts the inevitable, making a speech in which she remembers that when her great-grandfather set out as a pioneer traveling into the West, he was only 19, and his bride only 17. As he developed, Heinlein began trying to imagine women characters strong enough to share the adventure rather than being left to keep the homefires burning, and in The Rolling Stones the whole Stone family heads out to adventure in space together, headed by the tough and brilliant matriarch Hazel Meade Stone.
I go on at such length for a reason. The stories I have been summarizing teach young people that the shape of life is that of a romance quest, in which a sterile though safe environment is left behind and young protagonists set out on the great adventure of life, heading into the unknown but hopeful of encountering marvels. But what happens in “real life” is exactly the opposite. What are left behind are exactly the dreams of excitement and magic. What is abandoned as “childish” is the supposedly naive expectation that that is what life is like. Instead of adventure, a job—if you’re lucky—a dreary and soul-killing form of alienated labor. Instead of magic and wonder, the end of the animated world of childhood. Innocence dies into Experience, and the essence of Experience is disillusionment. In addition to adventure, the other theme of fairy tales is love. One leaves home to find romantic love, to find and win, through trials and tribulations, the prince or princess and live happily ever after. We have not entirely given up on this dream, but the devastations of adolescence do not seem to result in the ideal love of Dante and Beatrice, not even the doomed but beautiful love of Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde. I used to teach an essay called “Saplings in the Storm,” by Mary Pipher, author of the book Reviving Ophelia (1994, 2024) about what happens to girls when they hit adolescence, which is that they “go down in droves” as planes and ships disappear into the Bermuda Triangle (281). As a family therapist, Pipher says that “Girls between seven and eleven rarely come to therapy. They don’t need it” (280). Rather,
Most preadolescent girls are marvelous company because they are interested in everything—sports, nature, people, music and books. Almost all the heroines of girls’ literature come from this age group—Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Pippi Longstocking and Caddie Woodlawn. Girls of this age bake pies, solve mysteries and go on quests....They can be androgynous, having the ability to act adaptively in any situation regardless of gender role constraints. An androgynous person can comfort a baby or change a tire, cook a meal or chair a meeting. (280)
In other words, these are the female counterparts of Heinlein’s male boy adventurers—and in fact those boys often end up being partners with spunky girls of this type, as Harry Potter does with Hermione. But many actual adolescent girls lose this marvelous vitality, and along with it their self-confidence and equilibrium. Instead, they become moody, suffer from depression and anxiety attacks if not from worse things like eating disorders and self-mutilation. Meanwhile, their male counterparts do badly in school and are at risk of being co-opted into what we now call the manosphere, even though it is a parody of the traditional masculine ideal. Childhood has ended. Welcome to the world of Experience.
Why does this happen? One of the most famous of all Romantic poems regards it as simply inevitable. Human life in time is, like everything else in nature, cyclical. It is born, reaches the height of its powers, and declines. Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” often mercifully shortened to the “Immortality Ode,” is an elegy for the death of childhood seen as part of the human condition. It begins:
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;—
We come into this world “trailing clouds of glory.” But “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Around the growing Boy.” Then, Wordsworth cries, “Whither has fled the visionary gleam?” His answer is that “At length the Man perceives it die away, / And fade into the light of common day.” The theme of the poem is that what we get in exchange for the loss of the light in fact not what its title promises. No one seems to point to the fact that the body of the poem does not give us “intimations of immortality.” That would be the theme we might expect in a traditional Christian context. But, although the light is not a light from this world, we are not explicitly told to have faith that we will return to that world after death. Instead, the consolation we get from growing older in the gathering dusk is empathy, the ability to hear “The still, sad music of humanity,” admittedly a great gift. But that disjunction points to something. The loss of childhood is a repetition of the Fall from paradise. But in a post-Romantic context, we are not always promised a return—sometimes only a bittersweet consolation. The same is true in the great modern counterpart of the Immortality Ode, Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill.” Thomas describes his childhood at play on his aunt’s farm in some of the most beautiful paradisal imagery in all of poetry. Again childhood is boundless energy: “All the sun long it was running, it was lovely...My wishes raced through the house high hay.” But the result of his running is to “carry him out of grace.” These are two of the most beautiful poems in the world, but I think they have to be interpreted carefully lest we fall into a half-truth. We are not just creatures of nature, and Experience is ultimately psychological, not chronological. The neighbor girl told me there was no Santa Claus, but I have come to realize that that is a false rumor. Nietzsche said God is dead, but in fact Nietzsche is dead. The God whose funeral he conducted, the one Blake satirically called Nobodaddy, nobody’s daddy, has always been dead, just a spook. All the true spirits are alive and present everywhere, but we do not see them so long as we are in the State of Experience. As the Eye, Such the Object.
This will take a while to explain—and yet, both Socrates and Freud were right: sometimes we know things without knowing we know them. Popular culture is often the source of a wisdom that comes “out of the mouths of babes.” Some of the greatest comic strips are about children, and, of these, Calvin and Hobbes is one of the most popular because, although he is one of those little hellions, one of those “savages” that no one can civilize, we are on his side because he is unbounded energy, always being shown in dynamic action poses that are a kind of furious ballet. Especially in the Sunday strips, the whole page can become a swirl of action the equal of any superhero comic by Jack Kirby, who I suspect was an influence on Bill Watterson. Just looking at it is part of the pleasure of the strip. This is the liberated energy of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.
But Calvin’s physical energy is an expression of his imaginative energy, which is utterly untamed. He is a cornucopia of wild fantasies, often in the mode of young-reader science fiction scenarios, often involving metamorphoses into other identities. He is a Tyrannosaurus demolishing a city, King Kong style. He is Spaceman Spiff crash-landing on an alien planet and battling a disgusting alien enemy who happens to be his teacher. He travels in time. He hurtles with his tiger friend Hobbes on a toboggan, utterly out of control and ending in disaster. He plays “Calvinball,” in which you make up the rules as you go along and change them at will. It’s a strenuous life, especially because his world is as animated as he is. His jello, his baseball, and his bicycle are all demons that attack him. He simply cannot be disciplined into more than temporary control, and we live through him vicariously. Calvin will never accept the rules, which to him are stupid and without reason. We meditate on his example in that way in which we think about things without thinking about them. We know that there are reasons for some of the rules. And yet, Calvin is a Trickster, and he has the wisdom of Tricksters down through myth and literature. Which is: treat life like Calvinball. Make up the rules as you go along and change them at will. Calvin is impossible, but Calvin has not surrendered to Experience. You pay a price for being Calvin, but you’re more alive. He’ll grow out of it? Maybe not. Odysseus didn’t.
What is Experience as a psychological condition, different from mere aging? It is the repression of the imagination, the acceptance of limits upon the energy in the center of us, out of which we create our lives. Why do we accept the limits? Sometimes of course we are coerced into obedience, but often we are convinced that it is the right, the responsible, the inevitable thing to do. This is the temptation in the wilderness. But in a real sense, we don’t grow up. We just hide our childhood. This is another thing we know without knowing we know it. It is why we understand the meaning of “Rosebud” in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. It is the name of the childhood sled of the ruthless Charles Foster Kane, the last person anyone might think of in terms of innocence. It is his last word, and no one ever figures out its meaning. In the last scene, the sled is shown burning in a bonfire. Repressed innocence goes underground, where it smolders like a bonfire, like a capped volcano. Whatever is repressed turns monstrous, and what was once harmless turns into burning rage that may someday erupt. We know that Donald Trump was abused as a child by a monstrous father. Because of it, the tormented child in Trump is forever angry, and we are his revenge.
Fred Trump is a real-life example of a type that occurs quite frequently in literature. There is a type of personality that moves beyond control-freak obsessiveness into outright cruelty, a type of sadism that seems to be provoked by innocence, which seems to enrage it. Murdstone in David Copperfield is a quintessential example, as is Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter. Why should an adult with total power be provoked into rage by a helpless child who may do no more than ask for more gruel? Why would not the child’s gentleness and vulnerability soften the anger into pity? Because the sadist sees the child as the helpless figure he or she once was, and therefore still is in the unconscious, where time has no meaning. The temptation to empathy—and it is a temptation—would mean identifying with the victim, and thus becoming the victim, thereby reverting to the abused figure the abuser once was. Anything to escape returning to that victimage. Rather become the abuser yourself than identify with the abused. It is sick and twisted, but it is all too common.
The abuse often has a sexual element mixed up in it, because power is sexual, as in “This hurts me more than it hurts you” corporal punishment fantasies. This is a clue as to what goes on in the mind of someone like Jeffrey Epstein, where the destruction of innocence is not incidental to sexual pleasure—it is the whole point. That is why all the talk in Epstein’s crowd of discarding victim after victim after they become “used.” The thrill is in the using, the damaging. Once they’re broken, the thrill is gone. And the hatred of the victim perfectly explains the sadism of Ghislaine Maxwell, desperate to avoid falling into the female victim role, offering the sacrifices of young girls instead.
The logic driving these examples of sadistic power goes back to a strong-willed determination: “I am not going to be the helpless, bullied, humiliated victim, as I once was, as I see other people being.” That is understandable—but why go on to become the victimizer? Because, in the reductive world view of such a person, there are only two roles possible, victimizer or victim. You must be one or the other. In an aphorism attributed to Goethe, you must be hammer or anvil. That is the law of Experience, which is a Social Darwinist world without mercy, for mercy is weakness and will lead to your downfall. This is exactly Trump’s attitude and explains his whole life. It is sometimes called fascism, but that label is misleading. Fascism is an ideology, and this conviction is on a level below ideology. The upbringing that produced Trump is how you breed a vicious dog, and the dog doesn’t know anything about ideology either.
We would like to think of the Trump family, the Murdoch family, the Musk family, as anomalous, breeding grounds of toxic personalities that represent a fairly uncommon worst case scenario, a product of billionaire capitalism out of control. But I am increasingly convinced that there is more to it than that. The expelling of children from Innocence into the ruthless world of Experience has always been rationalized as necessity. Life is a harsh competition, the survival of the fittest, and gentleness doesn’t stand a chance. This is Social Darwinism, the rationale that grew up to justify laissez-faire capitalism. But the attitude is much older than that. It in fact has been dominant for all of human history. And why? Yes, humanity grew up out of the state of nature, and prehistoric life was no doubt tough, a matter of grim survival. But, through the power of the inventive imagination, humanity early on developed the means to insulate itself from much of nature’s harshness. Though most of recorded history, humanity has been more or less protected from the elements, has developed means of ensuring food security, and has become safe from predators to the point where we really have no natural enemies. Humanity has not been as comfortable as it has become in the last century or two, but the idea that we are subject to an unforgiving “law of the jungle” is quite simply a lie. I have been reading history lately, and it is a shattering realization that probably nine tenths of human suffering down through time has been caused by human aggression, by endless war and, in peacetime, economic exploitation by a ruling class. None of it has been “necessary” in the slightest. So maybe we can’t create utopia, the ideal state—maybe the very concept is problematic. But it would be totally in our power to create a reasonably humane and civilized life for everyone, if not for what is glorified as the “will to power” but is really a nihilistic deathwish so prevalent that we regard it as a norm.
In actuality, it is mass psychosis, and its typical form is Moloch worship, the sacrificing of the young, the annihilation of Innocence. The furnace of Moloch is war. Who fights wars? From Achilles forward, it has always been young men, men who have just left home. Sometimes, as at the beginning of World War I, they have enlisted willingly, deluded by dreams of glory of which they would be relentlessly disabused. At other times, conscripted. It has been rare that masses of young people resisted and said, as in my generation, “Hell no, we won’t go.” I am no pacifist, and feel that there are times when wars must be fought in self-defense or for people to liberate themselves from tyranny. But to skim through the 1200 pages of The Columbia History of the World is to realize that most wars are merely wars of aggression. Perhaps two thirds of those pages are devoted to whose army fought against whose. And a volume like that is necessarily an overview at 30,000 feet. It cannot give a picture of what war is really like on the ground. Sherman’s March to the Sea in the Civil War is said to have changed the nature of modern war, leading to the 20th-century idea of “total war,” without restraint, doing whatever it takes to win without humanitarian inhibitions. Sherman’s march began with the burning of Atlanta made famous by Gone with the Wind. The burning was not part of a battle: it was an aftermath, a furnace of Moloch exemplifying the idea of not just winning but of razing the enemy’s very existence to the ground. A line connects it to the furnaces of Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a century later. We note that the perpetrators of these conflagrations were the “good guys,” the Union army and the Allies. On the other side were the ovens of the Holocaust. We are back to the image of the demonic furnace discussed in a recent newsletter. Hell is no supernatural bogey. We create hell.
Whenever there has been good government, as there was when I was young until the 1970’s or so, whenever there has been within that peace an expansion of freedom, equality, a social safety net and a blossoming of education, science, and the arts, there have been those who plotted to bring it all down. Yet it is not strictly a modern phenomenon. It is striking how often the villains who have subverted the great dreams have been embittered children—often “bastards,” children who were called “illegitimate” and made to feel they did not belong. In at least the later versions of the legends, the villain who destroyed the Round Table was King Arthur’s son Modred, not only a “bastard” but product of an incestuous union with his half-sister. The same is true in Shakespeare. In the comedies, Don John in Much Ado about Nothing is rare in being an actual villain, even though an inept one, rather than only an obstructionist, and Don John proclaims loudly that he is determined to destroy his society because of his bitterness over being a “bastard.” In the tragedies, we know nothing about Iago, but tied with him for the Blackest Evil prize are Edmund, Goneril, and Regan in King Lear. Edmund is a “bastard.” His father Gloucester tries to treat him well, and yet socially humiliates him by making jokes to company about his illegitimate status. Goneril and Regan are mistreated daughters with an impossible autocratic father. They might as well be orphans, as there is not even a mention of a Mrs. Lear. This is Donald Trump syndrome—the angry children who come into great power and use it, both to take revenge and to become so godlike that they can never be mistreated again. Such people have become monsters because in growing up they have learned all too well the bitter lessons of Experience.
What is the moral of this meditation? First, that the fall into Experience is not inevitable, not a natural product of the cycle of life in time, at least not past a point. It is, instead, an error, something the human race has repeatedly plunged into tragically and yet unnecessarily. Experience is a reductive mental state, true only in the sense that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are Very Serious Thinkers who assure us that the idea that human evil is only an error is superficial. The human race can never be improved because there is a streak of evil innate in human nature, and to think otherwise is to deny “the reality of evil.” Often, they quote Paul: “The evil that I would not, that I do.” Such thinkers have a point insofar as evil is not merely some kind of logic error, to be corrected by pointing out the correct answer. The selfishness and aggressiveness of evil is a false reality, what Blake called a State, and it is perpetuated by deep-seated social conditioning. But it is conditioning, and not innate, not natural. No animal behaves as viciously as human beings are capable of behaving. If the conditioning goes so deep in some people that they cannot be changed, only prevented from gaining the power to do harm, nonetheless it is possible for us to change social conditioning to minimize the disillusionment of Experience in future generations. Wise heads will shake skeptically at such “Enlightenment optimism,” but we are not talking about the admittedly naive optimism of the Age of Reason. It was the inadequacy of 18th-century rationalism that gave birth to Romanticism, with its intuition that reason, though invaluable, is only an instrument of a greater power, the imagination.
As Northrop Frye pointed out, modern mythology since the Romantics has been revolutionary in shape. While most earlier mythology was conservative, the Romantics seized on and made use of one of the few potentially revolutionary traditional myths, that of Prometheus, the Trickster who stole fire from the oppressive gods and gave it to the human race. The Promethean myth promises that there is a power below, on a mysterious level under the facade of the ordinary world of Experience. If that power is understood politically, it signifies social change, even revolution. It can also be understood as repressed desire, as identical with Eros, and the 20th century saw various movements to liberate human desire. But the hidden Promethean power can be understood in a third, more fundamental way, of which the other two are corollaries. Blake saw that the liberation of human society and desire both depended on breaking what he called the “mind-forg’d manacles,” the mental blocks that keep us from imagining a better reality and also from believing that we have the power to change our condition. The real Promethean power, the source of all the other kinds, is the imagination.
It may sound strange that change for the better must begin with a refusal to give up childhood. Childhood is paradise: we have lost it, and we need to “get back to the Garden,” as Joni Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” has it. We got at least something right, we hippies. It sounded naive then and it no doubt sounds even more naive now, when there are overgrown abused children crazed with fear and hate who are throwing a gigantic temper tantrum, trying to smash everything in their power. The bullies must be stood up to, their bluff called. The lie they are pushing is exactly the lie that Experience, the realm of disillusionment in which the only reality is power, is real. It is in fact the great illusion, the great lie, and it proves itself such by vanishing. The Third Reich was supposed to last a thousand years. It lasted about five. Orwell’s dictatorship in 1984 insisted that it was a boot stamping on the human face forever, but these are tactics, intended to intimidate.
We have lost a good part of what we had of paradise because we were indifferent to the fact that some people were economically and socially excluded from that paradise. We must pay for our error, but when rebuilding after the present debacle we must plan beyond the Social Darwinist dreams of capitalism. The 60’s had already begun thinking in this direction, and we must go back and take up where the dream left off. What would that mean? Well, maybe we have misconceived paradise. There is an old question about what Adam and Eve did in paradise, because, after all, they didn’t have to work. Milton rather helplessly gives them the only kind of work he could imagine under the circumstances, gardening. But maybe Adam and Eve didn’t work—maybe they played. Like young dogs, like baby raccoons and groundhogs.
In his first book on the Bible, The Great Code, Northrop Frye defines play as “energy expended for its own sake, as with children’s play, or as a manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in ‘playing’ chess or the piano” (125). Then he says,
But the point is even clearer in the Book of Proverbs, where Wisdom is personified as an attribute of God from the time of creation, expressing in particular the exuberance of creation, the spilling over of life and energy in nature that so deeply impresses the prophets and poets of the Bible. The AV speaks of this wisdom as “rejoicing in the habitable parts of his earth (8:31), but this is feeble compared to the tremendous Vulgate phrase ludens in orbe terrarum, playing over all the earth. (125)
In his Bible class, which provided material for part of The Great Code, Frye added this:
The wisdom playing before God at the Creation again suggests a girl child; so that while the Greek goddess of wisdom is a woman in plate armour with a petrifying gorgon’s head on her shield, the Biblical conception of wisdom is something much more like a girl with a skipping rope. And it’s arguable, I think, that that is a far more convincing picture of genuine wisdom, of the expression of energy for its own sake. Certainly it is closer to Matthew’s vision of the infant Christ as the goal of the journey of the wise men. (175)
In Ingmar Bergman’s classic film The Seventh Seal, the apocalypse alluded to in the title takes the form of the coming of Death for the entire selfish, corrupt, and obsessed people of the cast. The only ones who are passed over and not compelled to join the Dance of Death are a childlike couple who are traveling players, in other words artists, people of imagination. Jesus tried to tell us that we have to become as little children again, but we would not listen. Very Serious Thinkers will no doubt object: oh, that would never do—that would mean to give up notions of the grand heroic march of historical progress towards ever greater...well, something or other. Does the idea that a redeemed human nature would be playful lack dignity? The answer is a line from W.H. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone”: “The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from.”
Blake has a poem called “Auguries of Innocence,” in other words signs of an Innocence not lost in the past but somehow possibly to come. It contains these lines:
He who shall teach the Child to Doubt The rotting Grave shall neer get out He who respects the Infants faith Triumphs over Hell & Death
What more is there to add but “Let us play”?
References
Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981, 1982. Also volume 19, edited by Alvin A Lee, in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press,
Frye, Northrop and Jay Macpherson. Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture. University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Pipher, Mary. “Saplings in the Storm.” In Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers. 8th edition. Edited by Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford. Pearson, 2012. 278-87.