Parenting & Family Quote by Alan Bennett

Memory turns perspective into architecture. Bennett's line takes a homely image - kids in a yard, faces near the lawn - and quietly rigs it into an existential question: did the world change, or did we?

The first half ("Were we closer to the ground as children") is literal and tender. Childhood is a physical condition: smaller bodies, lower horizons, a life conducted at the level of insects, mud, and the small dramas adults step over. But Bennett, the dramatist of domestic understatement, doesn't stop at nostalgia. He pivots to the sharper possibility: "or is the grass emptier now?" That's the sting. "Emptier" suggests not just less lush, but less inhabited, less storied. The lawn becomes a stage that's lost its cast.

The subtext is grief disguised as observation. It's a line about aging that refuses the sentimentality of "things were better then". Instead it implicates perception itself: adulthood raises you up - in height, status, speed - and that elevation thins the world. You stop noticing what used to teem: beetles, daisies, imaginary kingdoms, the feeling that time was thick enough to wade through.

Contextually, Bennett's work often makes comedy out of English modesty while smuggling in loneliness and regret. This question lands because it won't let you pick an easy culprit. If the grass is emptier, it might be modern life, suburban sanitization, a culture that paved over play. If we were simply closer to the ground, the loss is internal: not the world shrinking, but our attention.