Aging & Wisdom Quote by William Golding

Golding’s line lands like a diagnosis, and that’s the point: it weaponizes a familiar sentimental category ("childhood") by reframing it as pathology. The dash works as a scalpel. "Disease" is metaphor; "a sickness" is the insistence that the metaphor should be taken seriously, not poetically. Then the twist: it’s curable by time. You don’t heal through wisdom or moral effort; you simply "grow out of" it, as if maturity is less a triumph than a biological inevitability.

The subtext is Golding’s signature suspicion of innocence. Coming out of a century that watched "civilized" adults engineer mechanized slaughter, he refuses the comforting story that evil is learned later, imported from society. If anything, he implies the opposite: childhood contains its own volatile contagions - cruelty, tribalism, appetite - and adulthood is the social quarantine that sometimes contains them. That’s the dark joke embedded in the phrasing: we praise childhood as purity, yet we also tolerate in children the very impulses we condemn in grown-ups, excusing them as "just kids."

Context matters because Golding is the novelist who made a career out of stripping the pastoral off human nature. Read beside Lord of the Flies, the line isn’t anti-child so much as anti-myth: anti-Rousseau, anti-nostalgia, anti the idea that there’s a pristine self buried under culture. It works because it sounds like common sense while smuggling a provocation: if childhood is a sickness, what does it say about the adults who never outgrow it - or the societies that reward childlike cruelty with adult power?