ah, youth
i've been nannying a four-year-old named nathaniel who has a more extensive vocabulary than half the adult population of the world, i think, and calls me suh-neffuhnee. hanging out with him so much has made me ache for my youth in ways i can't begin to qualify. childhood is, once outgrown, an incontrovertibly unattainable existence worthy of insatiable envy, distasteful only in its ephemerality. (he taught me all those words.)
(well, maybe not, but he does use words like cooperative and pedestrian.)
i desperately wish that it were possible to revisit my youth so that i could experience it with poetically posthumous recognition of both its brevity and its value. the only concrete conclusion that i can draw is that it is by nature impossible to appreciate the beauty, truth, honesty, or simplicity of young life while living it, because realizing the significance of those virtues requires the knowledge that they will one day cease to exist in such unadulterated form, and that knowledge is not acquired until such cessation occurs. and that conclusion provides welcome, if minimal, comfort.
(well, maybe not, but he does use words like cooperative and pedestrian.)
i desperately wish that it were possible to revisit my youth so that i could experience it with poetically posthumous recognition of both its brevity and its value. the only concrete conclusion that i can draw is that it is by nature impossible to appreciate the beauty, truth, honesty, or simplicity of young life while living it, because realizing the significance of those virtues requires the knowledge that they will one day cease to exist in such unadulterated form, and that knowledge is not acquired until such cessation occurs. and that conclusion provides welcome, if minimal, comfort.