I was with some of my grandchildren yesterday and woke, today, with memories of the light in which they live--of how they still wake into Eden, of how time rolls along for them like the roads out of the Shire into the next adventure, blessedly free from monsters that have not yet invaded their sun-struck worlds.
Everything's still new, though I can see, in the oldest, time settling in its claws--yet, she's mostly surprised. The oldest child in each of the families is the one I tremble for, about to enter the merciless gauntlet of the world outside the walls of home. All the games; all the new rules, the new languages of self and other. "There are no truths outside the gates of Eden," a young Bob Dylan wrote during the dream of 1965. Way too dramatic to be true, but true enough to say a truth we, long outside those gates, have probably forgotten, so used to this rough world, so armored as we've become.
I'm sitting here hearing the children's laughter, their excitement at each moment's brightness.
Of all the poets, I think Wordsworth was most alert to their surprise and the cost of time:
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 poem, "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," ends with gratitude for having had the visions that the poet still recalls, even though those visions "have fled." As they have for all of us.
Everything's still new, though I can see, in the oldest, time settling in its claws--yet, she's mostly surprised. The oldest child in each of the families is the one I tremble for, about to enter the merciless gauntlet of the world outside the walls of home. All the games; all the new rules, the new languages of self and other. "There are no truths outside the gates of Eden," a young Bob Dylan wrote during the dream of 1965. Way too dramatic to be true, but true enough to say a truth we, long outside those gates, have probably forgotten, so used to this rough world, so armored as we've become.
I'm sitting here hearing the children's laughter, their excitement at each moment's brightness.
Of all the poets, I think Wordsworth was most alert to their surprise and the cost of time:
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 poem, "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," ends with gratitude for having had the visions that the poet still recalls, even though those visions "have fled." As they have for all of us.
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