"I think childhood is to everyone a lost land"

Childhood often lingers in memory as a realm both familiar and irretrievable, a place that everyone instinctively senses yet cannot physically revisit. The phrase evokes a collective human experience: no matter the specifics of one's upbringing, the early years are inevitably left behind, transformed by the passage of time into something mythic and distant. Adults carry images, sensations, and fragments of that period, but always shrouded in the haze of nostalgia and subjective recollection. That "lost land" suggests not just personal nostalgia but also a kind of universal exile shared by all; once people cross the threshold into adulthood, they are forever separated from that territory where innocence, wonder, and vulnerability were the norm.

What deepens the sense of loss is the recognition that childhood cannot be reclaimed, not fully. Memories can be revisited, photographs may be examined, and stories might be retold, yet these are only echoes of a reality now unreachable. The metaphor of a "land" underscores the substantial, almost physical presence that childhood maintained when it existed, a terrain navigated daily. There is an implicit yearning in imagining its recovery, a wish to return to moments untouched by the calculations, anxieties, and compromises of grown-up life.

Yet, this lost land is not solely a source of pain or regret; within its unattainability lies its power. It shapes individuals throughout their lives, manifesting in dreams, creative works, and the way adults interact with children or seek solace in play. Its inaccessibility makes it sacred, a unique birthplace for imagination, hope, and sometimes longing. Even as it remains beyond reach, it forms a vital part of one’s internal landscape, instructing, informing, and haunting the present with all the complexity, clarity, and mystery of a country glimpsed only in the mind’s inward journeys.