![]() It is some mysterious operation of the imagination, the part that can enter into mental universes from which one is soon to be forever excluded. But I feel, self-defensively perhaps, that her disappointment is more about her particular loss of what we all must lose. After all, she was forced to face the separation of her parents when she was only six years old. My eldest, Jean, nowadays seems perpetually disappointed in me and I can only ascribe this to the fact that I have let her down by proving unable to either be perfect or protect her against the world. This is perhaps the hardest part of all innocence to let go of. And, of course, the myth of the infinite power and goodness of parents. To believe in the irrational – Santa Claus, fairies, monsters under the bed. To not grasp imaginatively that death will come. It is, at one level, a rarefied quality of ignorance. When I watch my 10-year-old, Eva, dancing as if no one is watching, I know I am also seeing it. When I watch my youngest daughter, Louise, playing for an hour with Sylvanian families, singing to herself, I know I see it. I have felt in exile ever since childhood – not as a result of some traumatic experience, but the simple, slow dimmer switch of time passing and imagination coarsening.īut what is innocence? Like St Augustine on the subject of Time, 'If you do not ask me what time is, I know it if you ask me, I do not know.' ![]() The gap between innocence and experience is endlessly explored, like a gap in a tooth, by artists and writers. ![]()
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