[Published in The Red and Black, April 4th, 1978, Athens, GA.]
by Dwight Lyman
It seems something new came on the world near the end of last quarter, just before exams, when so many were in a mad funk of rush and worry. The birth of new life (it is called Spring) came to the ground, trees, bushes, birds—quite unexplainable, but there it was. Crocuses peeped up and the first dandelions appeared and birds ran off the notes of their songs in the mornings with a little more glee than a body had noticed before. Ah, then this was Spring. Life was rousing itself.
I was on North campus, reclining in a grassy patchy spot to do what studying had to be done—and I watched students passing busily to and fro, to and fro, in and out, in and out of the library. There were children, and in the children much more than in the students, their parents, could be seen the excitement, I mean the bodily excitement, of the new life.
There is, I am afraid, a certain dying—what else to call it?—among students, particularly at exam time. It makes its occurrence in the head, where students are busy structuring thoughts into set and established patterns, and from there this dying seeps subtly, silently into their bodies. You don’t see it in the children, but there it is quite clearly in the adults—as if some foreign army had swept its way in and conquered them.
A student, a university student in particular, is the battlefield over which this foreign army charges to make its conquest. And charges and charges, as if a thousand light brigades were all too few. By degrees, the student becomes a full-fledged adult, with full-fledged “adult” feelings, “adult” thoughts, “adult” acts. Student has been totally “adulterated.”
The process of learning is the process of culling out much of what a child is able to experience. The child, discovering vocal cords—the ability to make sounds—can (does, as many a parent knows) make any sound she chooses. But parents won’t allow this for long. The child must learn to limit her sounds to those which are part of the language—and only those. “Ungoogugaga” she must not say. It’s babyish. “Wa-wa. Wa-wa.”—No no. Must say “water.” “Wata” says the child with her inexact pronunciation. She hasn’t yet gotten her sounds down to that efficient clockwork of imitation that adults expect or are used to. Don’t worry about it though. In a few years she will learn to speak like an adult thoroughly, and will be bound down to specific meaning and sounds as surely a railroad tie is tied down to its gravel-bed. Parents will be pleased to have such a growing young girl.
In bodily movement, the child learns the same, to abandon what is spontaneous for what is efficient. The child, in moving from one location to another, is an ocean of extraneous movements—shoulders, arms, hips, all are moving at once. She skips, hops, runs, head bending to this then to that side. Even her running has so much free, unnecessary movement. But by the time she has become a full-fledged adult, she will be the epitome of an efficient walker, and when she runs, an efficient runner, no excess of movement and no waste of energy. Such is the adult. Even on the rare occasions when an adult skips, the adult skips efficiently. There is no wasted, no unnecessary, no spontaneous (the three words all mean the same) movement.
In school the child is taught to think only within the stricture of a (relatively speaking) rigid belief system. She will not be given the chance of viewing in its own perspective the outside of the established idea-structures of her society and her age. Opposite viewpoints may be presented her—undoubtedly—yet inevitably the basic philosophical givens remain the same—and thus they are unquestioned. It is education (this exposure, constantly, to a rigid age-bound paradigm of structured meanings) that turns a child into an ideologue, or a cool jelly-like pudding of middle-of-the-road feelings. Even the educated child’s deepest ‘felt’ feelings are only a gloss learned by continual exposure and re-exposure, much as language was learned or the normal (that is to say, the “adult”) ways of moving the body.
The very essence of youth, then, is spontaneity and lack of efficiency of movements: everything is done with a verve and an excess beautiful to behold. But the essence of adulthood and of “maturity” is structure—stiff, efficient walking (thus chronic bad backs), stiff thought-structures (and thus “patriotism” and bureaucracy and wars), even stiff, shell-without-the-snail use of language (thus the dead state of modern English and so much modern writing, and almost all conversation—contrast it to the living, if simple, language of a child.)
Adults are children who have died.
Adults, with bad backs and strict walking movements, efficient, dead-air adults. They are just dead air, bad-breathed robots, contrasted against kids. And what is more depressing to the spirit than seeing a child—barely in the middle of grammar school—who has already half-become an adult, with adult movements and adult-like choice of words? One knows that there is revealed there a past of many daily battles child against adult, and after much loss of spontaneous, vigorous youthful human blood, the war has largely been lost, a dishonorable peace has had to have been accepted—since dishonor, even for the human animal child, is better than death, a completely lost war.
What is the adult’s main weapon: it is called “love.”
The child’s love, and need for love, is made into a weapon of war, to be turned on her, plied against her human spontaneity.
Adults are children who have been shackled by the iron bars of love.
I looked up, with a very quick glance, from my studying. A squirrel stood chattering, a moment and a moment only, on a branch out of reach above me, then disappeared. In front of me, the library was closed. Two students, bodies swaying rhythmically as they walked, ambled slothfully down the sidewalk, beyond the corner of my view, and were gone.
I got up, troubled by my willful drive to be a student and my counter-need, deep in my blood, to be a child. Sun was almost gone as I made my way, much much too efficiently, past Park Hall. “Be a student?” I thought to myself. “Alright, go ahead then—be a student. But be a child first and foremost.”