"Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!"
About this Quote
Calling a baby a genius is a sly reversal of adult vanity: Sarton flips the usual hierarchy and dares the grownup to feel a little obsolete. The provocation works because it’s not really about IQ; it’s about plasticity. “Compared to a grownup person” is the quiet dagger - adulthood, in Sarton’s framing, is not peak capacity but a kind of narrowing. We trade the baby’s wild openness for competence, routine, and the comforting story that we’re finished products.
The line “Think of the capacity to learn!” reads like an instruction to the reader’s imagination, an attempt to reawaken awe toward a form of intelligence that doesn’t look like argument or achievement. Sarton piles up nouns - “freshness, the temperament, the will” - to insist that learning is not merely cognitive. It’s bodily appetite, mood, stubbornness, drive. The baby isn’t an angelic blank slate; it’s a force. That choice of “will” is key: she grants infants agency, a pressure toward the world, which makes adult complacency look like self-betrayal.
As a poet writing in the 20th century’s long shadow of war, bureaucracy, and mass conformity, Sarton’s praise of infancy also reads as a defense of inner life against systems that sand people down. The subtext isn’t sentimental parenting advice; it’s a rebuke. If genius is the capacity to change, then the tragedy of growing up is how eagerly we stop practicing it.
The line “Think of the capacity to learn!” reads like an instruction to the reader’s imagination, an attempt to reawaken awe toward a form of intelligence that doesn’t look like argument or achievement. Sarton piles up nouns - “freshness, the temperament, the will” - to insist that learning is not merely cognitive. It’s bodily appetite, mood, stubbornness, drive. The baby isn’t an angelic blank slate; it’s a force. That choice of “will” is key: she grants infants agency, a pressure toward the world, which makes adult complacency look like self-betrayal.
As a poet writing in the 20th century’s long shadow of war, bureaucracy, and mass conformity, Sarton’s praise of infancy also reads as a defense of inner life against systems that sand people down. The subtext isn’t sentimental parenting advice; it’s a rebuke. If genius is the capacity to change, then the tragedy of growing up is how eagerly we stop practicing it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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