Parenting & Family Quote by Pierre Loti

Loti’s line is a small, polished act of rebellion against the cult of adulthood. He opens with a swipe at “most other children,” then tightens the knife with “especially…those of today,” a phrase that turns private confession into social critique. It’s not just nostalgia; it’s a claim that modern childhood is already infected with adult impatience, trained to race toward usefulness, status, and legibility. Loti sets himself apart as someone who felt that race as a threat.

The subtext is more psychologically intricate than simple fear of responsibility. His “terror” intensifies “as I grew older,” a paradox that works because it captures the cruel math of time: the closer you get to a door you dread, the louder it sounds. The sentence structure mirrors that spiral. It keeps qualifying and adding clauses, as if the speaker can’t stop circling the thing he doesn’t want to name directly: the loss of permeability, wonder, and eroticized possibility that adulthood forecloses. In fin-de-siecle literary culture, this is the sensitive modern self speaking: hyper-aware, self-mythologizing, suspicious of bourgeois maturity.

Context matters: Loti was a naval officer and travel writer who built a career out of cultivated elsewhere-ness, turning foreign places and past moods into refuge. The terror of growing up reads like the origin story of that aesthetic: if adulthood is narrowing, then style, travel, and memory become escape hatches. The dig at “those of today” also reveals a familiar adult maneuver - using children as evidence that the present is worse - even as he insists he never wanted to become one of those adults at all.