It's a sad and awesome fact that so much of who we are, so many of the decisions we make, so many of the fuck-ups we perpetrate are so causally tied to the problems and events of our childhoods. Not to say that we aren't responsible for our mistakes nonetheless--we might even be more responsible for not having figured this out about ourselves and dealt with it; but how often delving into our motivations, do we realize that the antecedents for the decisions we make, both good and bad, are somewhere back in our early years? How often, in hurting another person, do we find out that the person we would really like to hurt is a parent who left or some other figure from the faraway past? And how much worse is it that we do cause pain to those who deserve it so little.
Wordsworth was right. The child is the father of the man; and, too often, the man is but a child.
Wordsworth was right. The child is the father of the man; and, too often, the man is but a child.
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At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:
Poor Tyler has passed by the spot, and has heard
In the silence of morning the song of the bird.
'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale
Down which she so often has tripped with her pail;
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.
She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade,
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade;
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have all passed away from her eyes!
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