[Jesus-post] Se and listen and then to say to his nurse, "Ce n'es

Mon Sep 20 20:41:20 CEST 2010

E flashes of understanding and action, from

the mind and members of childhood, is no
pleasure to see. The piano, for instance, as experts
understand it, and even as the moderately-trained may play it, claims
all the immediate action, the instantaneousness, most unnatural to
childhood. There may
possibly be feats of skill to which young children could be trained
without this specific violence directed upon the thing characteristic
of their age--their unreadiness--but virtuosity at the piano cannot be
one of them. It is no delight, indeed, to see the shyness of children,
or anything that is theirs,
conquered and beaten; but their poor little slowness is so
distinctively their own, and must needs be physiologically so proper to
their years, so much a natural
condition of the age of their brain, that of all childishnesses it is
the one that the world should have
the patience to attend upon, the humanity to foster, and the
intelligence
to understand. It is true that the movements of young children are
quick, but a very little attention would prove how many

apparent disconnexions
there are between the lively
motion and the first impulse; it is not the brain that is quick. If, on
a voyage in space, electricity takes

thus much time, and light thus much, and sound thus much, there
is one little jogging traveller that would arrive after the others had
forgotten their journey, and this is the perception
of a child. Surely our own memories might

serve to remind us how in our childhood we inevitably missed the
principal point in any procession or pageant intended by our elders to
furnish us with a historical remembrance for
the future. It was not our mere vagueness of understanding, it was the
unwieldiness of our senses, of our reply to the suddenness of the grown
up. We lived through the important moments of the passing
of an Emperor at a different rate from theirs; we stared long in the
wake of his Majesty, and of anything else of interest; every flash of
movement, that got telegraphic
answers from our parents' eyes, left us stragglers.
We fell out of all ranks. Among
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