The Course of Love

Sweetness

Three years after Esther’s arrival, William is born. He has a cheeky, winsome nature from the first. His parents will always remain convinced that only a few hours after leaving the womb, with apparent knowingness, he winked at them from his crib. By the time he’s four, there will be few hearts he leaves entirely cold. There is sweetness in the questions he asks, the games he plays, and the repeated offers he makes to marry his sister.

Childhood sweetness: the immature part of goodness as seen through the prism of adult experience, which is to say, from the far side of a substantial amount of suffering, renunciation, and discipline.

We label as “sweet” childrens’ open displays of hope, trust, spontaneity, wonder, and simplicity—qualities which are under severe threat but are deeply longed for in the ordinary run of grown-up life. The sweetness of children reminds us of how much we have had to sacrifice on the path to maturity; the sweet is a vital part of ourselves—in exile.

Rabih misses his children with particular intensity when he’s at work. In a setting marked by constant tension and professional maneuvering, the very idea of their trust and vulnerability seems poignant. He finds it almost heartbreaking to remember that there is a place not far away from his office where people know how to care properly about one another and where a person’s tears and confusion, let alone lunch menu and sleeping position, can be of such deep concern to another human.

It can’t be coincidental that the sweetness of children should be especially easy to identify and cherish at this point in history. Societies become sensitive to the qualities they are missing. A world that demands high degrees of self-control, cynicism, and rationality—and is marked by extreme insecurity and competitiveness—justly sees in childhood its own counterbalancing virtues, qualities that have too sternly and definitively had to be surrendered in return for the keys to the adult realm.

William is pleased by a panoply of things that the grown-ups around him have forgotten to marvel at: ant nests, balloons, juicy coloring pens, snails, earwax, the roar of a plane at take-off, going underwater in the bath . . . He is an enthusiast of a class of uncomplicated things which have, unfairly, become boring to adults; like a great artist, he is a master at renewing his audience’s appreciation of the so-called minor sides of life.

He is a particular fan, for instance, of “bed jumping.” You’ve got to have a long runway, he explains; it’s best if you can start out in the corridor with the bed covered with a huge pile of pillows and the sofa cushions from downstairs. It’s crucial that you get your arms properly up in the air as you run towards the target. When older people like Mama and Dada have a go, they tend to hold back and keep their arms down by their sides, or else they do that halfhearted thing where they kind of clench their fists and keep them up near their chest. Either one reduces the payoff quite a lot.

Then there are the many important questions that need to be asked throughout the day: “Why is there dust?” “If you shaved a baby gorilla, would it look like a human baby?” “When will I stop being a child?” Anything can be a good starting point for curiosity when you haven’t yet got to the stifling stage of supposedly knowing where your interests lie.

He’s not worried about seeming abnormal, for there is as yet, blessedly, no such category in his imagination. His emotions remain unguarded. He is not afraid—for now—of humiliation. He doesn’t know about notions of respectability, cleverness, or manliness, those catastrophic inhibitors of talent and spirit. His early childhood is like a laboratory for what humanity in general might be like if there were no such thing as ridicule.

Sometimes, when the mood strikes, he likes to wear his mother’s heels and her bra and wants to be addressed as Lady William. He admires the hair of his classmate Arjun and tells Kirsten with considerable excitement one evening just how much he’d like to stroke it. Arjun would be a very nice husband to have, he adds.

His drawings add to the sweetness. Partly it’s their exuberant optimism. The sun is always out, people are smiling. There’s no attempt to peer below the surface and discover compromises and evasions. In his parents’ eyes there’s nothing trivial whatsoever about such cheer: hope is an achievement and their little boy is a champion at it. There’s charm in his utter indifference to getting scenes “right.” Later, when art classes begin at school, he will be taught the rules of drawing and advised to pay precise attention to what is before his eyes. But for now he doesn’t have to concern himself with how exactly a branch is attached to a tree trunk or what people’s legs and hands look like. He is gleefully unconcerned with the true and often dull facts of the universe. He cares only about what he feels and what seems like fun at this precise moment; he reminds his parents that there can be a good side to uninhibited egoism.

Even William’s and Esther’s fears are sweet, because they are so easy to calm, and so unrelated to what there is truly to be frightened of in the world. They’re about wolves and monsters, malaria and sharks. The children are, of course, correct to be scared; they just don’t have the right targets in mind—yet. They aren’t informed about the real horrors waiting for them in adulthood: exploitation, deceit, career disaster, envy, abandonment, and mortality. The childrens’ anxieties are unconscious apprehensions of the true midlife terrors, except that when these finally have to be confronted, the world won’t find their owners quite so endearing or such fitting targets for reassurance and a cuddle.

Esther regularly comes into Rabih and Kirsten’s bedroom at around two a.m. carrying Dobbie with her and complaining of some bad dreams about a dragon. She lies between them, one hand allotted to each parent, her thin legs touching theirs. Her helplessness makes them feel strong. The comfort she needs is entirely within their power to provide. They will kill the daft dragon if he dares to turn up around here.

They watch her fall back to sleep, her eyelids trembling a little, Dobbie tucked under her chin. They stay awake awhile, moved because they know their little girl will have to grow up, leave them, suffer, be rejected, and have her heart broken. She will be out in the world, will long for reassurance, but will be out of their reach. There will, eventually, be some real dragons, and Mama and Dada will be quite unable to dispatch them.

It’s not just children who are childlike. Adults, too, are—beneath the bluster—intermittently playful, silly, fanciful, vulnerable, hysterical, terrified, pitiful, and in search of consolation and forgiveness.

We’re well versed at seeing the sweet and the fragile in children and offering them help and comfort accordingly. Around them, we know how to put aside the worst of our compulsions, vindictiveness, and fury. We can recalibrate our expectations and demand a little less than we normally do; we’re slower to anger and a bit more aware of unrealized potential. We readily treat children with a degree of kindness that we are oddly and woefully reluctant to show to our peers.

It is a wonderful thing to live in a world where so many people are nice to children. It would be even better if we lived in one where we were a little nicer to the childlike sides of one another.