The Land of Childhood

I’m thinking more of that vision people have of an ideal carefree country that has the same golden haze over it that we can see when we remember our own childhood or when we observe children.  (You don’t experience this much when you are an actual child until you are on the point of losing childhood, but the outside observer can see that it is very real).

The peach blossom country.

Never never land.

Going down under faerie hill for a night, or maybe a century, of happy revelry.

Arcadia.

The Garden of Eden.

There is of course a ‘bad’ version of all these.  A distorted destructive attempt to ape arcadia.

Faerie hill has a foot in both camps.

Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island.

The Land of the Lotus Eaters.

The Eloi from HG Wells.

The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas

(The Ones Who Walk Away is not a book I recommend.  Preachy, self important, and so on.  But a number of critics miss the mark when they complain that walking away doesn’t actually help the tortured kid.  True, but as literature its resting on the theme of transition from being a child to being an adult, which requires you to walk away from childhood.  You can’t remain a child while fixing the problems of childhood).

Generally the idea of some land of innocent fun sounds pretty good to people so the artist has to “cheat” a little by slowly revealing the dark underbelly, as in Omelas, the Eloi, or Pleasure Island.

But the best artists show that the problem isn’t the dark underbelly, its the thing itself.  Paradise can’t last and wasn’t meant to.  Attempts to make it last beyond its natural bounds are inherently destructive.  Tolkien is the king here.  It sounds weird to say that LotR is an epic about puberty blockers, but it kinda is.

But if we have a good thing, and a distorted version of a good thing . . . hmm, I feel a virtue chart coming on.  We think that virtues are just admirable personal characteristics, but the concepts work for anything good or desirable.

Lets try it out.  My antonyms here are tentative, feel free to propose alternatives.

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