In my lit class, we're talking about the loss of innocence in a novel written in Spain (since calling it a Spanish novel tends to confuse--there's a difference between Spanish and hispanic, and this novel is both). Our professor tells us that we have to remember that the narrator was eleven at the start of the (Spanish Civil) war, and that her life is hard to conceptualize without having lived it.

When did the US go to war, again?

When we were...eleven?

Adults forget. I was in my fourth grade classroom, one desk away from the teacher's desk, when someone came to the classroom and told her to turn on the news.

And look, yes, wars these days are different, more isolated to those fighting it, but we do know financial instability. We know prejudice, we know insecurity. We've been at war almost as far back as I have memories, and it does change who we are; I've never known this country as a prosperous place of opportunities; I've known news reports on unemployment and my dad's tight expression as we talk financial aid.

But I digress.

Having left class, for the day, I walked down the main campus stretch and heard, oddly enough, an ice cream truck. They know we're a college campus, no ice cream trucks usually drive this way, so the music stopped my mind dead in its tracks for a few seconds, as I tried to process exactly what was going on. The juxtaposition of the representation of two very different lives--that from our respective childhoods, and that of our college selves--seemed to take everyone by surprise. I watched it dawn on several different people, and, on each of them, there was this strange, dreamlike expression on their faces--like when you hear the voice of someone you once loved across the room, after years of distance and healing. Their eyes were warm and seeing but not seeing, kind of...far off. An ice cream truck. Running for money to the sound of that incredibly stupid music, inflatable pools, sprinklers, the stable middle class! The security of ignorance that comes with youth.

It's strange to read about the loss of innocence, because it's something we've all experienced so recently, in so many different ways. Growing up is a strange and gradual sensation, although there are certain markers, throughout time, that will stand out as major "adult" challenges. We all talk about the novel like it's second-nature, because it's so close to what we know in our own lives, despite the fact that the novel is about a fourteen-year-old girl in 1930s Spain. It's oddly visceral.

An ice cream truck on campus, though. Such odd timing.

“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.” --Marcel Proust
» Zanzibar on 2015-03-28 01:16:06

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