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By Root 1103 0

had been completed and had left them, and even after an expensive schooling—most of those present were middle-class people—defective, unfulfilled, if not warped. And so we were doing only what every generation had done; we were looking at our children, as if they had in them to be—that is, if we could think of the right ‘education’ to give them—beings quite different from ourselves. They could be better, braver, gayer. Oh, and more, much more—we thought of them almost as if they were the young of another species, a free, fearless species, full of potentiality, full of that quality which everyone recognises, yet is never defined, the quality which all adults lose, and know that they lose.”

These were the things you said—and more.

It is odd that I can hardly remember what you looked like as you spoke. I know I was awake enough—but even so I didn’t have enough energy to take in what you said, and to calm my own restlessness, and to watch you closely. Yet it was a night when I was prickling with energy, vitality, interest—just because I was angry (if that is the right word) at being there again. What you said explained the feeling of sameness, the againness. Yet the words you used, the energy you put into them, what you were feeling about it all—and it was what we felt too, for the young parents were stirring and awake and while they leaned forward on their chairs to look and listen, kept glancing at each other, even at people they hardly knew, to nod and smile as if to say: Yes, yes, that’s it, it is desperately true and we must not fail, we have to succeed this time … all this; the emotion or recognition in the hall was suddenly making us all alive. The sameness was gone. Our day-by-day selves were held at bay for a moment even while you said: Education means only this—that the lively alert fearless curiosity of children must be fed, must be kept alive. That is education. And, listening, we were lively and alert and fearless. Every one of us was soaked for that time with those qualities. Still stimulated, my friends and I drove back to their house. As we entered the living room, still warm and smoky from the early evening before we had left for the lecture, we began yawning. The stimulation was already gone. One of the children cried out in his sleep, and the father went up, while the mother said that she should take the child to a doctor, he was sleeping badly, was restless and had bad dreams. I understood that there was no connection at all between what was happening now—father going to soothe child, mother talking about doctor and medicines, and what these same parents had been feeling and aiming for even half an hour before, or even a few minutes before, in the car. It was all over. The time of being awake, of being receptive, of being energetic—had consumed itself. We don’t have much energy. Your words—or rather, what you had put into the words—had fed us, woken us, made us recognise parts of ourselves normally well hidden and covered over—and that was that. The evening ended as it had begun, some adults in a livingroom, talking, drinking, smoking, discussing the projected weekend school for children, but as if it were just another of their far-too-many chores and burdens.

But I was awake. I was as if stung awake. I did not sleep. And I sat by the window that night and I thought: Don’t let it go, don’t forget it. Something extraordinary did happen. Perhaps during that night while I sat looking into a suburban garden, I was like a child of three, four, five, a creature quite different from the person she was doomed to grow into. I was certainly remembering what I had been as a small child. I remembered things I had forgotten for years. Before those “prison shades” had come down. Before the trap had shut.

And when I returned home to my flat in London it stayed with me. What stayed? Not the words that you used. It was the feeling of the quality of what you said. It went with recognition, as if I had been reminded of something I knew very well. I was possessed with a low simmering fear that I would forget again, let go