The Secret is .......

I have just finished reading probably the best novel I have ever read.  It took me quite a while as I only read in bed and usually my eyes are only capable of only reading 3/4 pages but last night as it came to a gripping conclusion, I read for over an hour.  I also did not see the awful truth coming about the letter recipiant, Franklin and at the point I realised, my heart sank and I really felt upset.  A very powerful story, outstanding writing and it the captures the experience my generation.  The girl called Lionel.

However half way through the book, I read a few paragraphs that really startled me and hit a nerve.  I had to go back and read it several times - a bit like a hair-shirt.  It helped me crystalise my own thoughts about modern life that I could never artculate in such a concise way.  I have put it these paragraphs here just to remind me of not only these thought-provoking sentances and the nub of the arguement (which I agree with wholeheartedly) but also to remind me to read more of her work.
                                                  ___________________

Page 172

In the end, that's what Kevin has never forgiven us.  He may not resent that we tied to impose a curtain between himself and the adult terrors lucking behind it.  But he does powerfully resent that we led him down the garden path – that we enticed him with the prospect of the exotic.

(Hadn’t I myself nourished the fantasy that I would eventually land in a country that was somewhere else?) When we shrouded our grown-up mysteries for which Kevin was too young, we implicitly promised him that when the time came, the curtain would pull back to reveal – what?  Like the ambiguous emotional university that I imagined awaited me on the other side of childbirth, it’s doubtful that Kevin had formed a vivid picture of whatever we had withheld from him.  But the one thing he could not have imagined in that we were withholding nothing.  That there was nothing on the other side of our silly rules, nothing.

The truth is, the vanity of protective parents that I cited to the court goes beyond look at us we’re such responsible guardians.  Our prohibitions also bulwark our self-importance.  They fortify the construct that we adults are all initiates.  By conceit, we have earned access to an unwritten Talmud whose soul-shattering content we are sworn to conceal from “innocents” for their own good.  By pandering to this myth of their naïf, we service our own legend.  Presumably we have looked ‘the horror’ in the face, like staring into the naked eye of the sun, blistering into turbulent, corrupted creatures, enigmas even to ourselves.  Gross with revelation, we would turn back the clock if we could, but there is no unknowing of this awful canon, no return to the blissfully insipid world of childhood, no choice but to shoulder this weighty black sagacity, whose finest purpose is to shelter our air-headed midgets from a glimpse of the abyss.  The sacrifice is flatteringly tragic.

The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic-age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes.  The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies.  What’s a kid to find out?

Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but the pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. To this day, some of my most intense sexual memories date back to before I was ten, as I have confided to you under the sheets in better days.  No they, have sex too.  In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is that there is NO secret.  That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its suppression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.

Sure, by the time he was fourteen we had given up on trying to control the videos he watched, the hours he kept, what little he read.  But watching those stupid films and logging onto those stupid websites, swigging that stupid hooch and sucking those stupid butts and fucking those stupid schoolgirls, Kevin must have felt to fiercely cheated.  And on ‘Thursday’ I bet he still felt cheated.
                                                           ___________________

It reminds me of a memory I had.  I was around 6 or 7 and I loved drawing - having progressed from 4 years of colouring-in.  I drew a picture of myself looking like your typical 'princess' and wrote at the bottom, "Me at 21".   The people that surround you and the media from the age of zero lead you to believe anything is possible.  I am starting to realise that this is just not true.