Friday, November 27, 2009

Flower-like life

I was reading Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, and came across this sentence, where Wilde refers to Jesus Christ.

"He was the first person who ever said to people that they should live 'flower-like lives.' He fixed the phrase. He took children as the type of what people should try to become. He held them up as examples to their elders, which I myself have always thought the chief use of children, if what is perfect should have a use."

How true. We should all try to become children. The children in us is the only hope in our lives on this earth.

Science tells us about neoteny. We retain that special gift of childhood, to learn new things, and integrate them into our system.
The everyday of a child is literally the succession of a flower-like life, where, with learning new things, flowers bloom and blossom. Without awakening to the previously unknowns, the plants in our heart perish.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I fully concur. As a related topic, I firmly believe our nation has long maintained one of the world's best settings pertaining to elementary school education (judging from within the limited scope of what I have personally witnessed). Most kids seem to be truly enjoying their daily school activities to the full and our system in its entirety seems to have been working quite effectively and productively. Meanwhile, I suspect a gradual yet significant change of behavior (ie the ways they view their lives in general) among those high-spirited kids once their elementary school days are over. In a way, it seems as if they are virtually forced to morph into completely different beings. This should partly have to do with puberty of course, but to draw a comparison, I specifically find the Italians in general to maintain one of the most successful cultures which proudly allow the retention of their childhood mentalities throughout their lives. For them, this should certainly work both for the better and for the worse, but I wonder if there is any point in suggesting that we humbly take a closer look at other cultures in the world as an effort to make our younger generation feel much better about "who" they are, "where" they are, and the brightness of what lays in store for them.
SK

Stray sheep said...

I like Oscar Wilde.Being homosexual,he is killed by a society.I wish he lived in Japan.