“Why do we forget our childhood? With rare exceptions we have no memory of our first four, five, or six years, and yet we have only to watch the development of our own children during this period to realize that these are precisely the most exciting, the most formative years of life. Schachtel’s theory is that our infantile experiences, so free, so uninhibited, are suppressed because they are incompatible with the conventions of an adult society which we call ‘civilized’. The infant is a savage and must be tamed, domesticated. The process is so gradual and so universal that only exceptionally will an individual child escape it, to become perhaps a genius, perhaps the selfish individual we call a criminal. The significance of this theory for the problem of sincerity in art (and in life) is that occasionally the veil of forgetfulness that hides our infant years is lifted and then we recover all the force and vitality that distinguished our first experiences—the ‘celestial joys’ of which Traherne speaks, when the eyes feast for the first time and insatiably on the beauties of God’s creation. Those childhood experiences, when we ‘enjoy the World aright’, are indeed sincere, and we may therefore say that we too are sincere when in later years we are able to recall these innocent sensations.”

— Herbert Read

Source: Collected Poems (1966), pp. 16-17

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Why do we forget our childhood? With rare exceptions we have no memory of our first four, five, or six years, and yet w…" by Herbert Read?

Herbert Read 42

English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art 1893–1968

Related quotes

“During the last six years we have discarded and destroyed much that stood in the way of a renewal and transformation of our society.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Nobel Address (1991)
Context: During the last six years we have discarded and destroyed much that stood in the way of a renewal and transformation of our society. But when society was given freedom it could not recognize itself, for it had lived too long, as it were, "beyond the looking glass". Contradictions and vices rose to the surface, and even blood has been shed, although we have been able to avoid a bloodbath. The logic of reform has clashed with the logic of rejection, and with the logic of impatience which breeds intolerance.

“I venture to think that in future the Czechoslovak State cannot be maintained as an independent entity. You will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured only by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi régime. … It is the most grievous consequence which we have yet experienced of what we have done and of what we have left undone in the last five years—five years of futile good intention, five years of eager search for the line of least resistance, five years of uninterrupted retreat of British power, five years of neglect of our air defences.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1938/oct/05/policy-of-his-majestys-government#column_366 in the House of Commons (5 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement
The 1930s

“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 4 : Public Enemy

“When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of Hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Quoted in the Manchester Guardian (31 December 1977), and Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations (1988) https://web.archive.org/web/20000709051930/http://www.bartleby.com/63/90/4790.html edited by James B. Simpson; Says Who?: A Guide To The Quotations Of The Century (1988) by Jonathon Green, p. 17 http://books.google.com/books?id=xUwOAQAAMAAJ&q=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&dq=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KZO4U_WwFJSlqAaquoKoCg&ved=0CK0BEOgBMBk and The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1989), p. 45 http://books.google.com/books?id=bs0J36MpieIC&pg=PA45&dq=%22When+childhood+dies,+its+corpses+are+called+adults%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KZO4U_WwFJSlqAaquoKoCg&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=%22When%20childhood%20dies%2C%20its%20corpses%20are%20called%20adults%22&f=false

“For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling "civilized?" And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.”

Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) American broadcast journalist

UN Address (1999)
Context: For how many thousands of years now have we humans been what we insist on calling "civilized?" And yet, in total contradiction, we also persist in the savage belief that we must occasionally, at least, settle our arguments by killing one another.
While we spend much of our time and a great deal of our treasure in preparing for war, we see no comparable effort to establish a lasting peace. Meanwhile, emphasizing the sloth in this regard, those advocates who work for world peace by urging a system of world government are called impractical dreamers. Those impractical dreamers are entitled to ask their critics what is so practical about war.