Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more

-William Wordsworth

I have thought a lot how of how I might bring myself back as I was when I was little. It is not merely about the cares and responsibility of adulthood, I actually don’t mind that at all, but finding the level of excitement that I had when I was young, the enthusiasm of youth. I have tried not to be dismissive and to avoid rejecting things out of hand, but at this stage I’ve seen so many things, and it is hard not to find so much that is superficial, ridiculous or contradictory. While some people find me skeptical, curmudgeonly, by nature I am exactly the opposite. Many times I thought, what if I could bring myself back now the way I was. For one thing I was so idealistic because I did not have the experience to know better. I know better now but have not lost my idealism. That is the way I am. And in later years I have certainly tried to seek novelty hoping to find as great a surprise in things I found when I was young. I do make it a point to try to find out new things, but let’s face it, novelty is not as novel.

One great source of pleasure is finding something totally fantastic that you missed many times before, whether in noticing a new side to another person you know for a long time, or a new pattern or harmony in a piece of music that adds meaning, or the same with passages you have read before. Sometimes I hear something I have heard 10 times only to discover I failed to notice something I was insensitive to. This being Halloween I thought of Night on Bald Mountain, something that I have known since I was little, and was bowled over by a sense of inner peace in the quiet closing passages played by a clarinet and flute that came into my head. I played it myself. It is surpassingly beautiful. That is a new discovery you rarely make as a child but as a mature person. Some things are all the better for our having missed them earlier or improve in rehearing. This has come to me in a dream. That has happened many times before. But it has to be in your head to begin with and it is not available unless you have come across it time and again. So there are thrills of age as well as thrills of youth.

I’ve been reading The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. We all have a fantasy of reincarnation but the idea of being reborn as child pervades the novel. I don’t know how you can reincarnate an adult person who has lived many lives into a child, who has to learn everything to appear natural. That may be one explanation for precocity. One funny passage I thought might refer to me specifically. Having so many reincarnations and re-living so many lives gets old, what is termed the ennui of living many lives. Dr. Marinus a character says, “Being a doctor and neurologist gave my metalife a purpose.” Being a neurologist has been a great boon to me but I am still not sure it gave a purpose to my one life. Another story I found fascinating was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in which a man lives his life backwards and dies as a child. That is a single person, not a reincarnation of a one person into different temporal bodies, as occurs in The Bone Clocks in so-called atemporals. But I have thought quite a bit about the possibility of, not entering another body after death so much, but resurrecting my own childhood in my more than adult present self.