"The knowledge that we have about what it is to be human that we have as a child is something we necessarily must lose"
About this Quote
Dennis Potter suggests that the understanding of being human that belongs to childhood is a kind of knowledge that adulthood requires us to relinquish. Early experience is immediate, bodily, and saturated with imagination; feelings crash in without neat categories, and the present tense dominates. As we grow, we acquire language, roles, and habits that translate this flood into narratives we can live by. That translation is necessary. It protects, organizes, and allows participation in a shared social world. But it also erases a raw clarity about fear, desire, cruelty, tenderness, and wonder that children register without the adult armor of irony or justification.
Potter returned to this paradox throughout his work. In Blue Remembered Hills, adult actors play children, a device that refuses the safe distance of sentimentality. The children are not innocents; they can be vicious and tender in the same breath. The knowledge they carry is not moral wisdom but an unfiltered recognition of vulnerability and appetite. In The Singing Detective, the adult protagonist’s illness cracks his defenses, and fragments of memory, fantasy, and song reopen a path back to childhood pain. What returns is not a stable truth but a felt sense that being human is messier than the stories we tell to make sense of it.
Saying we necessarily must lose that knowledge acknowledges the cost of becoming a person who can endure time. Self-consciousness, socialization, and memory’s edits are the price of stability. Yet Potter also hints that art can briefly suspend the loss. Popular songs in Pennies from Heaven, or his final interview’s rapture at the “blossomest blossom,” conjure a childlike wonder refracted through adult awareness of mortality. The task is not to regress but to remember the loss without pretending it can be reversed. In that tension, Potter locates a humane truth: we live by fictions, but we are most alive when we feel the world before the fiction hardens.
Potter returned to this paradox throughout his work. In Blue Remembered Hills, adult actors play children, a device that refuses the safe distance of sentimentality. The children are not innocents; they can be vicious and tender in the same breath. The knowledge they carry is not moral wisdom but an unfiltered recognition of vulnerability and appetite. In The Singing Detective, the adult protagonist’s illness cracks his defenses, and fragments of memory, fantasy, and song reopen a path back to childhood pain. What returns is not a stable truth but a felt sense that being human is messier than the stories we tell to make sense of it.
Saying we necessarily must lose that knowledge acknowledges the cost of becoming a person who can endure time. Self-consciousness, socialization, and memory’s edits are the price of stability. Yet Potter also hints that art can briefly suspend the loss. Popular songs in Pennies from Heaven, or his final interview’s rapture at the “blossomest blossom,” conjure a childlike wonder refracted through adult awareness of mortality. The task is not to regress but to remember the loss without pretending it can be reversed. In that tension, Potter locates a humane truth: we live by fictions, but we are most alive when we feel the world before the fiction hardens.
Quote Details
| Topic | Youth |
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