And Another Puzzle Piece Finds Its Proper Place

This post, I swear, is not a complaint.

This post, I swear, is also not a brag.

One of the things that's guaranteed to upset me (OK, this part is a complaint) about artistic portrayals of precocious children (to be fair, often of children who were much more precocious than I was) is the cliche that the child is, culturally, completely out of step with her age cohort - doesn't listen to their music, watch their tv and movies, and is completely lost when confronted with the cultural references relevant to the average N year old. Precocity doesn't entail a complete divorce from your age group and/or its interests.

One thing that I've noticed for a while, though, is that I don't seem to share a lot of the touchstones of children's books that other people have. I'm aware of classics like Goodnight, Moon and Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein and Where the Wild Things Are, but with the exception of some of Silverstein, I didn't engage with any of those books the way my peers did - reading them and having them read over and over again, with care and love. I've never actually read Goodnight, Moon, and I've read one or two Seuss books, I think both in school as part of a class thing and at my younger cousins' house when I was bored. I know I've read Where the Wild Things Are, but I'm 99% certain that I picked it up in the grade school library, read it in three minutes, and put it back on the shelf. For one thing, looking back, I probably didn't connect with the book because I probably didn't like the monsters. It's just an aesthetic sensibility; I'm not captivated by Things that look like the ones Sendak drew.

I presumed, though, that perhaps my general divorce from very young children's literature had to do with my parents (when in doubt, we know who to blame); since neither had been a young child in an English-speaking culture, they didn't have a relation to the classic English language picture books. But it's not like I remember any Spanish or Portuguese classics of kids' lit either.

So anyway, today it hit me: I have a few rogue memories dating back to when I was three years old, but the semi-complete record of my life basically starts when I was five or six (though, since I'm not one of those people who can remember disproportionate amounts of their own life, kindergarten and first grade are pretty spotty). So my very oldest memories post-date my learning to read, and by the time I start having a coherent memory record I was reading way in advance of my age range. I don't remember a period of my life when Where the Wild Things Are - or any other primarily illustrated children's book - would've been pitched at my reading level, and books like that - mostly pictures, few words - wouldn't have been interesting to me because above all else I loved to read, the actual words.

The last bit explains why I was perfectly happy, a few years later, to read bales of the "young adult" type stuff you're assigned from 3rd-6th grade even though it was ostensibly far below my reading level; it was still text, and I was a devourer of text. I also wasn't emotionally or artistically sophisticated enough to really get everything out of the best adult fiction I was reading anyway, so the truly important differences between, say, John Bellairs and John Irving weren't really evident to me. Both authors wrote stories in text, and I got that Irving's stories were more complicated (and more "adult") but they were equally comprehensible to me as stories.

(The idea that Shakespeare is difficult to understand never made any sense to me for this reason: I'd read all his plays by the time I was ten or eleven, and I understood perfectly well what was going on, I was just way too young to appreciate the art or the emotion in them. [I was way too young to appreciate the art or emotion in most things I read at that age, including, I'm sure, A Prayer for Owen Meany, about which I remember nothing.] As an adult, I can't imagine that the emotion isn't understandable to anyone with adult emotional faculties, so I'm left with people being baffled by language that I could more or less decode as a fourth grader.)

So I guess that's why I don't have fierce nostalgic love for Where the Wild Things Are, while the rest of the world either grumbles over or (more often, it seems) shouts joyously over the trailer for the Spike Jonze adaptation.