Childlike by Jeff Paris

At an unfamiliar house:
I didn’t understand what I was hearing at first – I had crossed that fine line from mostly asleep to mostly awake, and the noise had crossed with me, into the Real. A babble, that built rapidly, with an echoing, unattached quality, punctuated by shrieks, calls, swirling around each other – it was not menacing, but was otherworldly; the tumult of voices a schizophrenic might hear, voices sped up, out of control. I knew my brain would decipher it in a moment, so I lay in the bright and slightly chilly room, savoring the oddness and mystery. The sound’s echoing was like a courtyard, or auditorium … and it clicked into place. The brick walls and concrete lot of the school across the street: what I had woken up to was the sound of a horde of children, just let out for recess. I had made those sounds once (was one of the loudest of the bunch, I’m sure), but had utterly forgotten. The sheer force of their voices amazed me. Adults just don’t yell like that, or if they do, it’s in pain. Lying there, now fully awake, assaulted by the noise (no less incredible for knowing what it was), the distance between my child-self and I seemed achingly vast.
What is it exactly that separates us from our childhood, and why can it seem so poignant? The obvious answer would be that it is time that separates us – but that is why we are separate from it, not how. The real answer is change. Many of these changes are out of our control – mainly puberty – but a large part of this change is societal, not physiological. We don’t really know how to be adults (or men, or fathers, or women, or citizens, or etc.…) until someone tells us. Each of these roles is potent and empowering, because they simultaneously lend order to our confusion, and bring with them the full weight of centuries of history. In a strange way, we a can find ourselves melding fictitious characters, these fabricated archetypes, in with our real selves.
It’s a regular lament among artists (painters, belly-dancers, tuba players, and certainly genre writers) that grown-ups are, on the whole, a much more bland bunch than their children. Anyone pursuing a non-traditional career is met with enough skepticism and misunderstanding, that it’s not surprising their opinion of "normal" folk suffers. Especially when that profession involves bringing some sort of color or beauty into the world. The subtext, or underlying tension, seems to involve what maturity, or adulthood, entails. There’s no real answer to that, but it makes genre writers, their readers, and basically anyone interested in Science Fiction or Fantasy or Horror, especially defensive. The stigma of immaturity is very strong in these fields. The disparity may be a semantic one – there is definitely something more childlike about artists, and great devotees and fans of art, than your average person. In some vital way, they are messing with the boundaries of these archetypes and roles, if not rewriting them completely.
As a child, imagination is constantly encouraged and called upon. It’s commonly thought of as an integral part of early development – the ability to conceptualize, to project oneself into theoretical situations, to expand the mind’s palette of shape and color and relation, to a size that will allow them to process and understand a world that is mostly strange and unexplored.