Some day not too close in the future, I shall probably have forgetten all about Injun Joe's gold, Becky Thatcher's engagement, the dead cat, their rafting along the Mississippi and most of the other tales about the Boy Who Attended His Own Funeral, but there is one particular anecdote about Tom Sawyer narrated somewhere in the earlier parts of the book that will never fade from my memory. Tom is punished (not so surprisingly) by his aunt, if I remember right, and ordered to paint a fence (three coats, mind you, is a hefty lot of work for a boy).
He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.
So what does he do? (He can't do what he's told, no sir, he's Tom Sawyer). He sees some unpunished kid come along biting a shiny red apple. Suddenly Tom starts singing to himself (or performs some such kind of 'happy-times' activity) and makes the other guy believe that its actually fun to paint and trades some painting time for the apple. This goes on and at the end of the day wily little Tom is richer by a couple of toys, some sort of kiddy-treasures and a painted fence.
You get the point? Imagine you have someone like that and now try to make sense of whatever I said before, should be a lot easier now. To have someone with whom you can be like that is, actually, bliss.
Last point I'd like to make- when I said, "Imagine you have someone like that", if you were really only 'imagining' that you have someone like that, I've got one line for you: "Go get a life."
Twain ends this episode with this:
" He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain."
He goes on to say state a fact thats quite easy to accept, but the ability to exploit which has avoided me till date:
" Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and...Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."
What struck me like the tang of a glass of over-salted lemonade lacking half a glass of water for the number of lemons squeezed in when I read this was the remarkable manner in which Twain had presented such a, what to say, 'interesting' (for lack of a better adjective (owing to my largely inadequate vocabulary)) observation, one that all of us experience but never think about, in such a casual manner, giving Tom, a free-riding devil-may-care kid, to say the least, insight that many of us fail to possess.
Perhaps you smirk and reconsider the degree of my naivety, thinking I'm making too much of this, for writers may write as they please, and while their characters might be juvenile, they themselves are not, and at their discretion bestow even upon a newborn the judgement of Daniel. If your thoughts are so, I ask you to consider a certain brilliant short story called "Little Girls Wiser Than Men", by Tolstoy.
This one literally left me dumbstruck, almost paralysed by the profoundness of the message he conveys, and quite more so by the degree of simplicity with which he does it. And everything he says in it is completely plain-possible, stuff like that actually happens. (In case you haven't read this one yet, I'd recommend it anytime over answering questions about your pet puppy for the sake of finding out your gangster name on a particular website)
I talk about these two particular works, for I find in them a reflection, though fictional, of one of my long time beliefs that there are certain great aspects to childhood that one should be at a major disadvantage to grow out of. Children possess with them, among others, two important qualities- straightforwardness and ignorance.
First, children can never hide their emotions. You can always call little johnny's fib about the sugar, for he always covers his mouth after a lie. They're completely transparent, and have no idea how to lie convincingly.
And second, as Robert Lynd aptly puts it,
"To children, for all we know, the world may still seem to be full of people who laugh because they are happy and smile because they are kind."
Someone said ignorance is bliss. Presumably, they didn't mean not knowing whats going on around you, but rather being unaware of the seriousness of whats going on around you. As Oscar Wilde rightly says, in his truly classic spirit,
"Life is too important a thing to be taken seriously."
I'm sure you're by now leaning back in your chair with a smug smile under your nose, ready to educate me if only I was right in front of you that these qualities. Let me finish. You definitely can't be a child in a dog-eat-dog world, with what seems like half the nation ready to hoodwink you the moment you blink (exaggeration, my dear, is a marvelous tool to the inexperienced writer). No, I'm not, as no one is, going to be like that all my life, thats definitely not what I mean. When I would be like that is when I'm with a person with whom I can have a conversation along the same lines as this:
Batman: He gave me this ring with a kryptonite stone. He said -Superman: I have many enemies who have tried to control me. And I live in fear that someday, they might succeed. If that ever should happen -- If I should ever lose control, There would only be one sure way to stop me.
Batman: Do you realize what you're asking?
Superman: I do. I want the means to stop me in the hands of a man I can trust with my life.
