The Course of Love by Alain de Botton

Author:Alain de Botton
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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.

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