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What is it about life that necessitates that as we grow up we in effect shatter our bliss that we had as children? Didion says of her baby, “She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for... the ambushes of family life” (141). Didion views the real world like most people do. A world that once we see it clearly for the first time, we can never go back to a world of blissful ignorance. What about growing up makes us lose our bliss we had as children? Most people look back at their childhood and they remember happy fond moments of when their parents loved them, when they felt like they were the only ones that their parents cared for. Why is it that Didion feels like she can never go back to what she knew? When a child leaves home for college, or to get married, it is a very definite act of separation. It is an act of saying; I will now make my own decisions. The rules that protect the children of the home, no longer apply to those leaving, they are to make their own rules. That is what is so final about leaving home and why the bliss known as childhood is shattered. It is because the child now has been exposed to things in the world that he or she has to take care of. There are bills to pay, consequences to not being to places on time, and even having a job. Innocence is defined by Dictionary.com purely as “the lack of knowledge or understanding”. All of these new things rob the child of what was known, and sadly to cope with it, most people be come hardened to the joys of life.
Didion says that, "Marriage is the classic betrayal" (140). The reason for this is that once you leave and get married, you are in sense betraying your family ties to what you once knew. Didion's husband never shared any of her memories as a child, and as it is put in the story, "what could the Canton dessert plates mean to him?" (139). Then how could the memories that Didion remember fondly transmit to her husband with any of the same sense of fondness? Because this pull between what she and her family knows and what she and her husband knows, she is estranged to her family and that helps to break the innocence she once felt as a child because Didion and a person in Didion's circumstance does not feel at ease being at home anymore because one would feel like they would have to be in a constant struggle on who to please.
Thankfully as a child one can feel home and at peace with their surroundings. Another author wrote about the innocence of children. In Galway Kinnell’s story “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”, he describes the innocence of a very young child, whom after the author and his wife had made love, comes to their doorway dressed only in his pajamas, and says “Are you loving and snuggling? May I join?” (Kinnell 121). The child then lies down and falls asleep between the man and woman, quite happy with being their child. This series of events are quite important to the argument of innocence because the child being in pajamas shows just how fragile he is both in body and in mind. Imagine a six year old child standing there in the doorway, asking to join you and your wife on the bed; because he knows the level of affection that there is between you and your wife and wants to be apart of that. Would you turn him away? No, the reason why one would not is that he still is in childhood innocence, he does not know that it might be taboo for him to be there right then. All he cares about and notices is that there is love in the air. It is genuine love, and he feels it, straight to his core. That is what he wants to be apart of he loves his parents and by having the child lay between them the author knowing or not is showing many aspects of innocence. Another factor for allowing a child to be naive and safe from the harsh realities of the real world is when the boy lay between the author and his wife, they “touch arms across his little, startingly muscled body” (Kinnell 121). In order to touch arms, and also to feel their young boy beneath them, they must have been resting their arms on him. One could envision that as being a cage which would then be the support system that protects a child's psychology until he is mature enough to shatter the dream, and survive in the harsh world that is reality. Dictionary.com also goes on to define innocence as being the “absence of guile or cunning; being naive”. This is childhood bliss, to be naive and innocent of the world.
At what point in life is one at the gateway between bliss and reality? Many people remember the past with very fond memories. The author Pat Mora describes this passage of our life extremely well in “Sonrisas”. In it she talked about standing in a door way that conjoined two rooms. These rooms represented the lifestyles of two very different people. One room contains a very clean, bland sterile room with people that wear fake smiles at best. While the other room holds a very vibrant room which has very nice people that are just sitting back and reminiscing on yesteryears. The difference between childhood bliss and reality can be explained in this way by using Mora's rooms, The bland modern room can be considered to be reality, because everything is very fast and to a large degree not affected by the day to day adventures of everyday life. Where as the other room is like our youthful innocence. It is happy, it feels lived in, the sights and colors are of the room are not a glare to our eyes, but rather a thing that draws them in. This how most of the world stands, between worlds. Everyone at some point has to go through the door of reality but everyone peeks through the doorway and into the room of their youth; if only to remember the happiness they felt when they did not yet have to worry about the pains and sorrows of reality, when they were still sheltered by their parent's loving embrace.
Through life mankind goes through the same steps over and over again. The rising generation is granted it's years of blissful youth, and then after at period of being loved by their parents as well as being nourished psychologically, they are forced to see the world for how it really is, and sadly in doing so their childhood bliss, is but a dream; a dream shattered by the onset of reality. However, it would be impossible for life to exist if we only had one or the other. For if no one knew reality for what it really is, then we would be a world full of blissfully ignorant people who could not contribute to society, nay there would be no society to contribute to. On that same token if we had no childhood then we would all be a world of cold heartless people who would have no inspiration in their day to day life and we would certainly die out as a people because there would be no kindness that we could pass on to our children to start the cycle over with their generations. It has been said that one must know misery to know happiness. For if we did not have the cold gray bleak reality look at, then how would we relish in the golden years of our childhood? It would be impossible.
Works Cited Page
Didion, Joan. “On Going Home” Uncommon Knowledge. Ed. Rose Hawkins and Robert Isaacson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996. 139 – 142
"innocence." Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1). Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006. 28 Sep. 2006.
Kinnell, Galway. “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” Uncommon Knowledge. Ed. Rose Hawkins and Robert Isaacson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996. 120 - 121
Mora, Pat. “Sonrisas” Uncommon Knowledge. Ed. Rose Hawkins and Robert Isaacson. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996. 151
childhood is awesome... i wish i could go back! hahah.
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