"A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further back - it is already so far"
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Childhood, in Meynell's hands, isn't a blank slate; it's an antique. The line turns the usual story of growing up inside out: infancy isn't the "beginning" so much as a dense inheritance, already crowded with "long traditions" before the child has had time to choose a single one. That word "beset" does quiet work. It suggests not gentle guidance but a kind of siege, as if custom, family script, religion, class manners, and the expectations of a whole society arrive first and the child's own personality has to fight for breathing room.
The paradox - "his infancy is so old" - is the point. Meynell collapses time, implying that what feels freshest in human life is, culturally, the most preloaded. A child carries the accumulated past not as history lessons but as atmosphere: lullabies, rules about silence and propriety, gendered cues about what kind of wanting is allowed. By the time the child becomes an adult, adding years doesn't make infancy more distant, because infancy was never merely chronological. It was already anchored in something older than the individual: tradition as a force that makes personal time feel secondary.
Writing in a late-Victorian/early modern moment that obsessed over progress, education, and the "making" of citizens, Meynell offers a corrective that lands like a soft rebuke. She treats modernity's confidence as naive. The real beginning, she implies, is never a clean start; it's a start in the middle, inside a past that has been waiting for you.
The paradox - "his infancy is so old" - is the point. Meynell collapses time, implying that what feels freshest in human life is, culturally, the most preloaded. A child carries the accumulated past not as history lessons but as atmosphere: lullabies, rules about silence and propriety, gendered cues about what kind of wanting is allowed. By the time the child becomes an adult, adding years doesn't make infancy more distant, because infancy was never merely chronological. It was already anchored in something older than the individual: tradition as a force that makes personal time feel secondary.
Writing in a late-Victorian/early modern moment that obsessed over progress, education, and the "making" of citizens, Meynell offers a corrective that lands like a soft rebuke. She treats modernity's confidence as naive. The real beginning, she implies, is never a clean start; it's a start in the middle, inside a past that has been waiting for you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Youth |
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