(I was reading Andre Comte-Sponvilles essay on ‘Time’ in his book The Little Book of Philosophy. His considerations on the concept of time made me further consider the main character Nick, from Ernest Hemingway’s Indian Camp.)
Understanding comes from experience-- exposure. As we see in Ernest Hemingway’s Indian Camp, as it is acceptable for the child, Nick, to think ‘he could never die,’ as his age induces the acceptance of his innocence and in such his naivety to mortality. But it seems not only to be based on innocence, but rather on experience. In our life the sensation of the ‘present’ will never cease to be, for nothing can cease to be ‘unless the present continues...it has always continued, endured, persisted.” A child more sensitive to this seeming eternity, this continuity that is the present would not relate it to another, “Thinking about it; the present is the only thing I have always had in abundance. “ (The need for more time would be different because it is almost always a desire to pull or put more into the future and not in the exact moment) “How is it possible to observe the present cease to be when the present is the prerequisite to sight, to cessation and to being?” And as this is true how then is it possible to ask a child to disregard the eternal sensation of present, the only place in which they can experience, and the only thing they have known to understand the concept of mortality. Instead we just allow the concept to grow, it is a perquisite that it will come with experience and sufficient exposure. Sufficient because we can not undermined the strength of innocence, as we see in Indian Camp, as the tragic events were still not enough to over come innocence, which is why it is not just innocence, but time and experience.
Experience busies our minds with thoughts, through experience we grow more conscious of our world, it is the maturity of our demands that requires this, our mind that allows this.
Without the mind there would be nothing but a continues present, without past or future... the mind plays a role because memory exists, because the body exists and it remembers the past, the present and even (think of your appointments, your plans, your promises) the future... It is no longer movement, but consciousness.
A child lacks experience, and such the consciousness of our world that a more mature mine would have. Children are allowed to live in the present, without planning or promising for the future and remembering the past as truths, and therefore an eternal and constantly present truth.
A child will see simply the truth, and the truth regardless of weather it took place in the past does not cease to be true:
The past exists for us only in the present, as a part of the present: it exists- and this is the paradox of memory- only in that it is not the past. Does this mean that a past, which no one remembers, would be absolutely nothing? It is not that simple. For even though something is no longer it remains true-eternally true that is was. A little girl cries; she’s in Auschwitz, crying because she is cold because she is hungry; a little girl who will be led o the gas chambers in a few days later- let us say in December 1942. No one remembers her name, or her face. It was too long ago; all of those who knew her are dead. Her body has disappeared; how could anyone remember her tears? True. But that which took place nevertheless remains true, and will always remain true, even if, today or tomorrow there is on no to remember it. Each of her tears is an eternal truth, as Spinoza would put it, and without it there could be no truth. Does this mean that past exists after all? No, because this truth, too, is present, it always presents: to the mind, eternity is nothing more than the ever-presence of the truth. It is not to say that the past remains; it is that the truth does not pass away.
As a child becomes more conscious he becomes more aware of danger and subsequently of death, which is not a bad thing, as for without this awareness life would have a ‘different savour’, and as discussed before, then comes the discovery of the past, the eternal present, and the future. “Death is something both necessary and impossible. Necessary, since every moment of life is marked by it, like a shadow from another realm...it appears to us like a vanishing point for everything”. To understand mortality you must first wait for innocence to subside, which will naturally happen through experience, for conciseness to build, and essentially for the concept of time to develop. It is therefore acceptable for us to accept innocence and the lack of understanding in children of mortality. As it is even more acceptable that Nick, an innocent young boy, yet to experience much, and with little concept of time, believes that “he could never die”.
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