With sweet-brier, and bon-fire, and strawberry-wire, and columbine

[sovay]

We had no construction this morning! Absence of it did not prevent me from waking like a shot around the usual hour of earth-moving and lying awake for as long as it took my body to believe physically enough in the quiet to fall back asleep, but the worst disruption we had on our street this afternoon came from the normal urban scourge of leafblowing. I slept far later in the afternoon than I had planned and am taking it as good for me, in the same way that yesterday I spent more than twelve hours in bed and as far as I can tell most of them asleep. Have some links.

1. The last time I walked around the reservoir, I passed a planting of new trees at the Lexington Community Farm. I was able to call across to a volunteer working on the far side of the nascent orchard who told me they were all fruit trees, of which the only species I can remember are elderberry, sour cherry, and pawpaw, which I expressed surprise would grow this far north, but she was from Virginia and assured me it was doing fine. I will have to remember in a few years to try the local pawpaws.

2. I decided I was not the ideal subject for this test of blue-green color categorization when after about two rounds I wouldn't have called the sample swatch either color as such and started mentally falling back on verdigris, turquoise, faience, and icebergs with blanket options on γλαυκός and glas. It isn't that I can't see the gradations. It's that I have trouble with the agreement to categorize them as just one or the other. I have taken it several times with about a ten-point spread in results. I understand that Basidium-colored is not in any case a registered number with Pantone.

3. The New Yorker's review of Katherine Rundell's Impossible Creatures (2023) has convinced me that I should seek her out her children's books, the entire catalogue of which had heretofore eluded me, and also that The New Yorker is about to receive a deluge of letters, possibly including from me:

Some years ago, Rundell published a slim little essay-as-book aimed at adults, "Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise." Musing and anecdotal in tone, it is basically an elaboration on a remark by W. H. Auden: "There are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experience, but there are no good books which are only for children."

That's true as far as it goes, but it obscures an important point: good books for children, even outstanding books for children, are immeasurably better when you are an actual child. When I was a kid, books like "A Wrinkle in Time" and "Tuck Everlasting" upended my world, sliding me straight out of my bedroom and into eternity. When I reread them in adulthood, the flames had burned to embers; I could remember the fire but not feel it. That's often the case when you revisit books you loved in your youth or catch up on the ones you missed or were born too early to encounter at the intended age. As a grownup, you may enjoy such works, but you can no longer wholly enter them. You are, in an inversion of that childhood injustice, too tall to ride the ride.

Bzzt! No! Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, do not attempt to convince me that on revisiting children's books of my childhood I do not see more in the outstanding or even the good ones than I could when I was five or ten or fifteen years old or even thirty-five. Of course the angle is different, but to adapt an image from one of those multiply revisited books, Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951), whose acute and numinous strangeness has not worn off in thirty-something years, it doesn't keep me from entering the door. What on earth would I revisit them for, if the experience were so much like peering through the dimmed glass of nostalgia? Was I just supposed to stop reading any new books from the children's section of the library, whose emotional boundaries are so traditionally porous with young adult and now middle grade literature that I can't even tell where the reviewer would draw the cutoff of the age of wonder? I haven't been a child since, ritually, the age of twelve, or more biologically, fourteen; most of my reading of children's books has perforce occurred beyond that at maximum window of a decade; regret inform that I still have unmanageable quantities of feelings about some of the characters encountered during that period or even after. I am talking as recently as last week. I believe in the reviewer's experience of embers, but to generalize it feels like some weird fetishization of the child's unfiltered eye or the literary equivalent of the anti-intellectual fallacy that knowing about Rayleigh scattering takes the beauty out of the sky's blue. I don't think I have ever had a book of incredible importance to me as a child fall out of meaning in adulthood, especially not because I had learned more about the world or writing or myself in the meantime. tl;dr what an amazingly silly thing to say in the middle of a review presumably intended to convince an adult audience to pick up a children's book. I am literally signing off this post to re-read some Eleanor Cameron.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Bzzt! No! Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, do not attempt to convince me that on revisiting children's books of my childhood I do not see more in the outstanding or even the good ones than I could when I was five or ten or fifteen years old or even thirty-five.

Amen I say unto you, that statement is perfection; yea, I could not say it more fully or better if I expended 5,000 words.

Also, I truly enjoyed the perusal through your back pages of all the links provided in the two sentences beginning with "I haven't been a child since..."

(I would love to try a pawpaw one day)

[princessofgeeks]

So glad you had a rest from the noise.

[thomasyan]

Oh, wow, I remember reading about pawpaws in some elementary school assignment, and was curious about what they might taste like. It would be great to have a chance to try some!

[aurumcalendula]

Yay for a reprieve from the construction noise!

I tended to skew towards blue with that test but was grumpy teal etc. wasn't an option (which I know would defeat the purpose, but still).

[gwynnega]

I am glad you got good sleep! (We had an earthquake last night around four a.m., which I didn't feel but which is probably why I woke up around that time. I am hoping for no earthquakes tonight!)

[pameladean]

OH YAY SLEEP! And it's not true that you can't make up sleep debt, they have had to take that back. You can and it's very restorative. I am so glad.

On the last subject of your post, the people I've seen describing this experience come from a particular direction. Lois Bujold talks about having read, as a child, a book about people travelling through a blizzard, and she remembered it as a thrilling multi-page adventure with many sensory details; but when she revisited the book as an adult, her entire recollection was a single sentence, and she had inserted the rest herself as an avid imaginative reader.

The same general direction produces people like me, who returned to favorite books in my twenties and found that they were much shorter than I had remembered, and that the parts I had found mysterious were now explicable. This did not happen with every book that I'd read. But I was indignant, and got rid of some of my books that disappointed me in this way. And I wrote the Secret Country books, a now maddeningly (as I write a sequel and need to remind myself what I was thinking) dense, multi-layered, detailed, complicated story that was like what I had thought those simpler books were when I was much younger.

In my thirties, I missed my books that I'd gotten rid of and had to go replace them all. They had not regained the glamor and mystery that they had in my younger eyes, but they were themselves and had many virtues and pleasures still to provide me with.

I think the person promulgating these experiences is over-generalizing and possibly feeling betrayed. I don't know how old they are, but they might learn better. I think that people who were intelligent readers from the first do not suffer these reverses, but I really wasn't: I was very literal-minded and not very observant as a young reader. But we can get better.

P.

[sartorias]

Oh so well said! I saw that review and shook my head, wondering if the person was obsessing over the resonance of The First Time.

[dhampyresa]

I decided I was not the ideal subject for this test of blue-green color categorization when after about two rounds I wouldn't have called the sample swatch either color as such and started mentally falling back on verdigris, turquoise, faience, and icebergs with blanket options on γλαυκός and glas.

I think you'd be interested in the book I'm currently reading, "Bleu: Histoire d'une couleur" by Michel Pastoureau (iirc it has been published in English as "Blue: history of a colour").

I've never seen faience as a colour term before! In French, "faïence" is a kind of ceramic.

[yarrowkat]

yay for a break from the construction noise and some catching up on sleep!

i have had the experience of re-reading a childhood favorite (The Witch of Blackbird Pond comes to mind, and Island of the Blue Dolphins) and finding it precisely as rich and beautiful as i remembered, with perhaps more nuance to the adult eye. and I have had the experience of revisiting a childhood favorite and finding it smaller and the story rather thinner than i remembered - my child's imagination of it having colored my memory of it. and then the book feels rather pale in comparison to the remembered version.

[regshoe]

I've definitely felt with some of the children's books I've read as an adult that I would have got more out of them in some sense if I'd read them as a child, and I think children's books can be... more significant, I'd say, rather than better, when you do read them as a child. I think it has something to do with having very little context for anything and each new book adding quite substantially to your knowledge/experience of What Things Exist in the World. But that's not the same as the books not working at all when you revisit/first read them as an adult, and I agree that there's still a lot to see from that different angle! My reading would be much poorer if I didn't still read books written for children.

[choco_frosh]

Pawpaws: Wikipedia tells me* that your confusion may be due to (a) the word having historically also been used for the Papaya, and (b) that Asimina triloba apparently not actually native to Massachusetts?
However, it HAS been introduced here (and grows well) and I've had it: Somebody brought some to a dance I was at in I wanna say Fall 2019.** As the descriptions tell you: it does taste like some sort of tropical-fruit custard, and it is a LOT.

* what you have already looked up, namely
** And a friend-of-a-friend apparently wound up with a whole pile of 'em, so I may be getting to eat more tomorrow!