They see the world as a whole, mysterious perhaps, but a whole none the less. They do not divide it up into airtight little categories, as we adults tend to do.
As I have since learned very well, little children strongly dislike being given more help than they ask for.
Their curiosity grows by what it feeds on. Our task is to keep it well supplied with food.
But children, at least before they meet the ready-made fantasies of TV, don’t want to be omnipotent. They just want not to be impotent. They want to be able to do what the bigger people around them do–read, write, go places, use tools and machines. Above all, they want, like the big people, to control their immediate physical lives, to stand, sit, walk, eat, and sleep where and when they want.
We are seeing something new in human history, a generation or two of children who have most of their daydreams made for them.
The two processes are, after all, the same; as we move farther and farther into the world, we take more and more of it into ourselves.
All my fantasies did for me–no small thing–was to keep alive a feeling that the world is in many ways a fascinating and beautiful place.
By now the art or science of giving complicated instructions to incredibly quick but still stupid machines has become the giant field of computer programming.
The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, do what he can see other people doing. He is open, receptive, and perceptive. He does not shut himself off from the strange, confused, complicated world around him. He observes it closely and sharply, tries to take it all in. He is experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it. He is bold.
I never want to be where I cannot see it. All that energy and foolishness, all that curiosity, questions, talk, all those fierce passions, inconsolable sorrows, immoderate joys, seem to many a nuisance to be endured, if not a disease to be cured. To me they are a national asset, a treasure beyond price, more necessary to our health and our very survival than any oil or uranium or–name what you will.
Gears, twigs, leaves, little children love the world. That is why they are so good at learning about it. For it is love, not tricks and techniques of thought, that lies at the heart of all true learning. Can we bring ourselves to let children learn and grow through that love?
A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing. Why can’t we make more use of this great drive for understanding and competence?
It is probably a mistake, anyway, to assume that whatever little children touch they will destroy, and that we must therefore keep them from touching anything that is not theirs. This dampens their curiosity and confidence.
She showed that very little children could easily be taught to move, not just exuberantly, but also deftly, precisely, gently.
A child doesn’t work that way. He is used to getting his answers out of the noise. He has, after all, grown up in a strange world where everything is noise, where he can only understand and make sense of a tiny part of what he experiences.
When we see a chair in a room, we can easily imagine that chair in another part of the room, or in another room, or by itself. But for the baby the chair is an integral part of the room he sees.
Most of us are tactful enough with other adults not to point out their errors, but not many of us are ready to extend this courtesy (or any other courtesy, for that matter) to children.
Bill Hull once said to me, “Who needs the most practice talking in school? Who gets the most?” Exactly. The children need it, the teacher gets it.
His message could be summed up, You cannot learn anything about yourself from your own experience, but must believe whatever we experts tell you.
In that respect, the movie marked a narrative angle that Linklater has repeatedly returned to: the personal historical present, a kind of Polaroid of the moment developed by a man farther along in time. We’re meant to be fully immersed in the world it portrays, but that world always exists relative to an offscreen future; we know where it leads, although the characters do not.
Given the precision and the vagueness, you are forced to re-see the lilacs of your own experience.
Imagine then what happens when somebody comes upon the silence of the Fayum faces and stops short. Images of men and women making no appeal whatsoever, asking for nothing, yet declaring themselves, and anybody who is looking at them, alive! They incarnate, frail as they are, a forgotten self-respect. They confirm, despite everything, that life was and is a gift.
The images convincingly represent men, trees, hills, helmets, stones. And one knows that such things grow, develop, and have a life of their own, just as one knows that the acrobat can fall. Consequently, when here their forms are made to exist in perfect correspondence, you can only feel that all that has previously occurred to them, has occurred in preparation for this presented moment. Such a painting makes the present the apex of the whole past.
I won’t make the same mistake again. I’ll make others, of course.
Throughout history, there are always new terrors – even if a few disappear, yet there are no new happinesses – happiness is always the old one.