Book: The Children's Book
Quotes of Book: The Children's Book
The men and women of the Golden Age, Hesiod wrote, lived in an eternal spring, for hundreds of years, always youthful, fed on acorns from a great oak, on wild fruits, on honey. In the Silver Age, which is less written about, the people lived for 100 years as children, without growing up, and then quite suddenly aged and died. The Fabians and the social scientists, writers and teachers saw, in a way earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires and intelligences. They saw that they were neither dolls, nor toys, nor miniature adults. They saw, many of them, that children needed freedom, needed not only to learn, and be good, but to play and be wild. But they saw this, so many of them, out of a desire of their own for a perpetual childhood, a Silver Age. book-quotechildhoodnostalgiafreudShe remembered the tale she had told to herself of the young woman carrying the packet containing the deaths of Pete and Petey, the young woman walking endlessly in grim weather across the moors, with the unopened packet. There was no room in that packet, for this.She thought of the forest of coeval boys, all eternally present, crowding her room, and the old Olive thought idly, this is a story, there is a story in this.And then she saw that there was not. There would be no more stories, she thought, dramatically, uncertain whether this too was a story, or a full stop. book-quoteOlive Wellwood told no stories about Goldthorpe, or the Gullfoss mine. She had packed away the slag-heaps and winding-gear, the little house in Morton Row, with its dark uninhabited parlour, its animated kitchen and pocket-sized garden, the ever-present stink of the ash pits across the yards, and the grime that floated onto the strips of lace curtain. She had packed it away in what she saw in her mind as a roped parcel, in oiled silk, with red wax seals on the knots, which a woman like and unlike herself carried perpetually over a windswept moor, sometimes on her head, sometimes held before her on two arms, like the cushion on which the regalia lie at coronations. This vision was not a story. The woman never arrived, and the parcel was never opened. The weather was grey and the air was turbulent. When Olive Wellwood found her mind heading in that direction, she was able to move imaginary points on an imaginary rail and shunt her mind away from "there" and back to Todefright, with its penumbra of wild woods and flying elementals. book-quoteGod," said Benedict Fludd, "your God, that is, strides in and out of my life with no warning. One day he seems impossible-laughable, laughable-and the next, he is imperious." He stopped. He said "It is like the phases of the moon, maybe. Or the seasons of the sphere we live on, rolling in and out of the light, skeleton trees one day, and then snow, and afterwards the bright green veil and after that the full heat and shining. Only it is neither regular nor predictable. And there are-others-who stride in, when he takes himself off. Who seem persuasive. Like Hindoo demons who are gods in their own terms. book-quote
