"Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?"
About this Quote
A wry, wistful question that turns on two kinds of loss: the shift in our perspective as we grow and the thinning out of the world itself. As children we were literally nearer the earth, faces level with daisies, ants, and the hidden architecture of a lawn. Each blade could be a forest; a beetle, a marvel. Adulthood lifts the gaze. Distance flattens detail, habit dulls curiosity, and the small life that once filled an afternoon slips from notice. The line wonders whether the emptiness we feel belongs to us or to the ground.
Alan Bennett, with his characteristic mix of tenderness and dry skepticism, often tests memory for its truthfulness. He knows nostalgia can embroider the past, yet he also knows that not all loss is imagined. The grass may indeed be emptier. Pesticides, clipped lawns, vanishing clover and wildflowers, and the decline of insects have literally drained variety from the sward. A postwar childhood of unstructured play, hedgerows, and scruffy patches has given way to managed spaces and screens. So the question refuses a tidy answer. It asks us to hold two realities at once: we have changed, and so has the world.
There is also a philosophical register. Closeness to the ground stands for intimacy with life, for a scale at which wonder is possible. Maturity often means speed, abstraction, and a protective carapace against astonishment. The emptiness we sense may be grief for time we cannot reenter, but it is also a critique of how we now live. Bennett hints at a remedy without prescribing one: change your stance. Kneel, look closely, give attention back to the ordinary. Doing so will not restore what has died, but it can restore the faculty that let the grass teem in the first place. The question becomes an ethics of noticing, and a gentle elegy for what attention and nature have both lost.
Alan Bennett, with his characteristic mix of tenderness and dry skepticism, often tests memory for its truthfulness. He knows nostalgia can embroider the past, yet he also knows that not all loss is imagined. The grass may indeed be emptier. Pesticides, clipped lawns, vanishing clover and wildflowers, and the decline of insects have literally drained variety from the sward. A postwar childhood of unstructured play, hedgerows, and scruffy patches has given way to managed spaces and screens. So the question refuses a tidy answer. It asks us to hold two realities at once: we have changed, and so has the world.
There is also a philosophical register. Closeness to the ground stands for intimacy with life, for a scale at which wonder is possible. Maturity often means speed, abstraction, and a protective carapace against astonishment. The emptiness we sense may be grief for time we cannot reenter, but it is also a critique of how we now live. Bennett hints at a remedy without prescribing one: change your stance. Kneel, look closely, give attention back to the ordinary. Doing so will not restore what has died, but it can restore the faculty that let the grass teem in the first place. The question becomes an ethics of noticing, and a gentle elegy for what attention and nature have both lost.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
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