REAL CHILDHOOD
The world is old because its history is made up of successive childhoods
and of their impressions. Your hours when you were six were the enormous
hours of the mind that has little experience and constant and quick
forgetfulness. Therefore when your mother's visitor held you so long at
his knee, while he talked to her the excited gibberish of the grown-up,
he little thought what he forced upon you; what the things he called
minutes really were, measured by a mind unused; what passive and then
what desperate weariness he held you to by his slightly gesticulating
hands that pressed some absent-minded caress, rated by you at its right
value, in the pauses of his anecdotes. You, meanwhile, were infinitely
tired of watching the play of his conversing moustache.
Indeed, the contrast of the length of contemporary time (this pleonasm is
inevitable) is no small mystery, and the world has never had the wit
fully to confess it.
You remembered poignantly the special and singular duration of some such
space as your elders, perhaps, called half-an-hour--so poignantly that
you spoke of it to your sister, not exactly with emotion, but still as a
dreadful fact of life. You had better instinct than to complain of it to
the talkative, easy-living, occupied people, who had the management of
the world in their hands--your seniors. You remembered the duration of
some such separate half-hour so well that you have in fact remembered it
until now, and so now, of course, will never forget it.
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