Childhood

Some deem I'm gentle, some I'm kind:
It may be so,--I cannot say.
I know I have a simple mind
And see things in a simple way;
And like a child I love to play.

I love to toy with pretty words
And syllable them into rhyme;
To make them sing like sunny birds
In happy droves with silver chime,
In dulcet groves in summer time.

I pray, with hair more white than grey,
And second childhood coming on,
That yet with wonderment I may
See life as in its lucent dawn,
And be by beauty so beguiled
I'll sing as sings a child.

"Second Childhood" ~ Robert W.Service

Comments

Dinesh ^club

. . . He was influenced especially by gestalt theory, a school of psychology which explores how experience comes to us as a whole rather than as separate bits of input. ~ Page 230

Of course we have to learn this skill of interpreting and anticipating the world, and this happens in early childhood, which is why Merleau-Ponty thought child psychology was essential to philosophy. This is an extraordinary insight. Apart from Rousseau, very few philosophers before him had taken childhood seriously, most wrote as though all human experience were that of a fully conscious, rational verbal adult who has been dropped into this world from the sky -- perhaps by a stork. Childhood looms large in Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ and in Sartre’s biographies; Sartre wrote in his Flaubert book that ‘all of us are constantly discussing the child we were, and are’. But his strictly philosophical treatises do not prioritise childhood as Merleau-Ponty do. ~Page 231

3 years ago.

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