We're all children. We invent the adult facade and don it and try to keep the buttons and the medals polished. We're all trying to give such a good imitation of being an adult that the real adults in the world won't catch on. Each of us takes up the shticks that compose the adult image we seek. I'd gone the route of lazy, ironic bravado, of amiable, unaffiliated insouciance. Tinhorn knights of a stumbling Rocinante from Rent-A-Steed, maybe with one little area of the heart so pinched, so parched, I never dared let anything really lasting happen to me. Or dared admit the the flaw.
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The adult you pretend to be convinces himself that the risk is worth the game, the game worth the risk. Tells himself the choice of life style could get him killed — on the Daytona track, in the bull ring, falling from the raw steel framework forty stories up, catching a rodeo hoof in the side of the head.
Adult pretenses are never a perfect fit for the child underneath, and when there is the presentiment of death, like a hard black light making panther eyes glow in the back of the cave, the cry is, "Mommy, mommy, mommy, it's so dark out there, so dark and so forever.
2 comments:
That's not really dark, per se, but it is kind of tan and sandy, just sayin'.
There's a book I'm reading that is about exactly this phenomenon of the adult really being a child inside...to the end. The book is Motherland by Paul Theroux and it's only a slightly veiled portrait of the author, who has had a full life and a highly successful career but who, in the presence of his octogenarian and still very dominating mother regresses to childhood. So I don't know your author but I'm reading an author telling the same tale.
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