What do my 7-year-old, Play-Doh-squishing, Lunchables-eating brother and I have in common?
We both spend overwhelming amounts of time indulging in cartoons, television shows and other media deemed “too young” for us by the public-at-large and then vehemently denying their hold on us.
For my brother, the incriminating list consists of a few guilty pleasures that Only Babies Like, for instance: “Thomas the Tank Engine,” Dr. Seuss and the “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom” song. His denial upon being teased takes the form of shrill “nuh-uh”-ing, with the occasional rhetorical flourish added for effect (e.g. “your brain doesn’t work!”).
My collection of juvenile fascinations is more expansive. Atop the list of infantile entertainment I resort to in times of stress-induced panic are a few stubborn holdovers from my long-gone youth: “Calvin and Hobbes,” a battered copy of “The Little Prince,” holiday episodes of “Peanuts” and so on.
I’m not the only immature kid on the block, either. We all do it: catching up with old favorites, letting our inner child out for a few moments of carefree play. I caught my roommate in bed with A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh” instead of her Dostoevsky reading. A semester without Disney Sing-Alongs in Griffith Theater would be unimaginable. Last December was apparently “Change Your Profile Pic to Your Favorite Pokemon” month on Facebook.
But though we are as guilty of being babies as my brother is, our collective denial may be even shoddier than his. It doesn’t take the form of a blatant lie but rather a rationalization worn thin with overuse.
To excuse our continued love affair with childhood hobbies, we blame nostalgia, eager to diagnose ourselves with a strain of Peter Pan Syndrome. We finish a conversation about our favorite Saturday morning cartoons and with a sigh say something to the effect of, “Oh, the good ol’ days. Remember when we used to be so happy/innocent/untroubled?”
To be sure, we all sometimes long for the uncomplicated afternoons of childhood when we were blissfully unburdened by term papers, career decisions, political affiliations and sexually awkward situations. It’s easy to think back to our prepubescent glory days as a time we’ll never have again.
But this Romantic idealization of childhood does youth an injustice. It assumes that there exists a specific Then and Now, a previous time of Innocence to be contrasted to our current disillusioned state of Experience. In actuality we don’t have to see life in such a binary, inherently contradictory way.
The very fact that we, as college students, are still captivated by certain aspects of childish culture speaks to the inaccuracy of this division.
It may even be dangerous to so neatly categorize our life experiences, relegating so-called immaturities of the past to, well, the past. After all, why do we scoff at Disney endings, Calvin’s passionate devotion to his stuffed tiger, Charlie Brown’s perpetual football-kicking failure? Why do we consign hopefulness and idealism to trite love songs and Christmas commercials?
We do so because we think these stories unwise and somehow irrelevant to Real Life. Our adult wisdom tells us that no one lives happily ever after, that Calvin will inevitably grow up to abandon Hobbes in a box in his closet, that Charlie Brown should really stop being friends with sadists.
Maturity has taught us to be cynics. Likewise, it has taught us to equate childhood with naïveté. We are so committed to our impression of the big, bad, real world that we dismiss anything we deem too simplistic, too wide-eyed.
Ironically, this tendency is guilty of the very mistake it attempts to avoid: it oversimplifies. Childhood isn’t just one big playground, and kids aren’t unaware of hardships. The universal appeal of films like “Where the Wild Things Are” emphasizes the overlap of juvenility and maturity. Despite its fantastical premise, Spike Jonze’s newest movie strikes a balance between foolish inexperience and darker undertones of betrayal and abandonment.
Likewise, “Calvin and Hobbes” (named after the theologian and the philosopher with whom the comic strip’s main characters share their names) frequently offers sharp insight into metaphysical questions asked by people of all ages. And to this day, “The Little Prince” is the best spiritual guide I have ever read.
To me, this proves the natural wisdom and relevance of seemingly immature stories. I am convinced we would actually benefit from the dilution of our adult skepticism through the reintroduction of youthful hopefulness into respectable society. We could stand to learn something from fairy tales, comic strips and other various and sundry forms of juvenile entertainment.
It’s about time we all became a little less mature and a little more like my brother.
Shining Li is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every Tuesday.
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