The Ever-Present Lure of Childhood

When we're children, we're often in a hurry to grow up. To our young eyes, adulthood as a time of unlimited freedom.

Later, we look back to our childhood, real or imagined, and wish for those carefree days again.

I'm exploring this theme, among others, in my novel in progress. One of my favourite poets, one not well known these days, St.-John Perse, also explores this theme in "To Celebrate a Childhood," a poem found in Éloges and Other Poems.

He asks, as I do, “Sinon l’enfance, qu’y avait-il alors qu’il n’y a plus?” (“Other than childhood, what was there in those days that is not here today?”)

Perse is not, I think, seeking a list of dates, events, inventions, names of kings and presidents. so much as the sense of things and the feeling of things. Childhood, as we look back on it, is a state of mind, perhaps more real in our memory of it, than it was when we first lived it.

In "Fern Hill," Dylan Thomas suggests that we should celebrate childhood in all all its innocence before we grow old and follow the sun out of grace. Looking back, the poet writes, Time let me hail and climb, golden in the heydays of his eyes, and green and golden I was huntsman and hersman, the calves sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold, and the sabbath rang slowly in the pebbles of the holy streams."

Childhood in so many ways is our own personal Garden of Eden out of which we grow up and lose our innocence. Our journeys pull us away from that innocence perhaps, as Robertson Davies wrote in Fifth Business, “One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.”

We cannot--at least for now--stay in the Garden. We have miles to go before we sleep and worlds to discover and ourselves to explore. But, why not, I wonder, can we not carry more of those old green and golden days with us into the practical world of adulthood.

The World Needed Harry Potter, So He Appeared

It's hard to imagine being the motive power behind the largest book publishing event in history. As the books have appeared one after the other en route to the final book just two weeks from now, I have wondered how an author might feel as readers, critics, marketing people and even bookmakers debate what should or should not happen to his/her main character (s).

We haven't read it yet, but all is said and done, manuscript-wise.

Would the same series of books have clicked if Rowling had sent the first of them off to prospective publishers ten years earlier? Maybe. But it wouldn't have been the same. All the variables that synchronistically fit together to produce the so-called "Black Swan" (a huge unpredictble event that can't be replicated) phenomenon would have been in place yet.

Each of us who has read the books and seen the movies has brought something of ourselves into the mix and into the world's consciousness. Each book is the book + the reader, each with his or her own frame of reference, sets of friends to discuss it with, other books to compare it with.

Many of us see Harry and think "yes, individuals matter in the fight between good and evil." We don't need to sit on the sidelines and wait for the media-certified heroes of the day to step in and fight the fight for us. We don't need to wait for governments, or neighbors, or science or even Jo Rowling.

Whether Harry lives or dies--or has lived or died in copies all ready at the printer--he has appeared and brought back hope that magic lives and that each of us can find it.