Parenting & Family Quote by Alice Meynell

Childhood, for Meynell, isn’t a cozy scrapbook; it’s the nearest alien planet. The line’s sly command - "turn to his own childhood - no further" - cuts against the romantic habit of looking outward for the sublime. You don’t need ruins, empires, or exotic travel to feel history’s chill. Your earliest self will do. That dash acts like a gate: beyond it lies the tempting sprawl of biography and nostalgia, but she wants the reader halted at the threshold where memory is vivid enough to sting and yet irretrievable enough to estrange.

The intent is renewal, but not the self-help kind. "Renew his sense of remoteness" frames disconnection as a spiritual discipline: to remember childhood properly is to admit you can’t re-enter it, can’t fully translate it. The subtext is a rebuke to adult certainty. The grown mind likes to believe it’s continuous, coherent, in control; childhood exposes the lie. You meet a prior version of yourself whose fears, delights, and logic are simultaneously intimate and unreadable. That’s the "mystery of change" she’s pointing to - not mere development, but the unsettling fact that a person can remain "you" while becoming someone else.

Context matters: a late-Victorian/early modern sensibility, when psychology was emerging and time itself was being reconceived by modernity. Meynell, a poet of finely calibrated attention, turns inward to find the era’s deepest modern feeling: the self as a moving target, with memory as both evidence and fog.