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Pascal Bruckner The two immaturities
Contrary to an overly extended heroic idea, there is no possible humanity without regression, without dotage or babbling, without exquisite relapses into stupidity. To be bearable, the tedious stagnancy of life must go hand in hand with an unfailing puerility that rebels against order and seriousness. Also existing is a good use of immaturity, a way of remaining as close as possible to the seductions of childhood that nourish within us an invigorating impulse against the sclerosis of routine. In each stage of life, indeed, two dangers stalk us: that of renouncement that aims to pass as wisdom, which is often nothing more than the other face of fear, and that of the caricature that incites us to pretend we are young, to simulate an eternally juvenile enthusiasm. How do we mature without resigning ourselves? How do we conserve mental freshness without falling again into adolescent simplicity? Now then, what we comprehend in the instants of the grace of existence, those marvellous moments in which ecstasy overcomes us, is that there are two childhoods possible in life: the first, which abandons us during puberty, and another childhood in the age of maturity, which blossoms in spurts, candescent visitations, which flees from us as we try to trap it. Childhood is a second candour that is recovered after having lost it, a beneficial rupture that offers us a rush of new blood and breaks the shell of custom. Hence there is a way of infantilising oneself that is a testimony of renovation against the petrified and fossilised life: a capacity to reconcile what is intellectual and what is sensorial, of exiting the duration, of perceiving what is unknown, of being astounded by the evidence. To go through every childhood, as San Francisco de Sales demanded, is to stay close to the fecundity of the first years, is to break the limits of the old self by submerging oneself in a purifying bath. Perhaps, an accomplished life is just that: a life in a state of rebirth, of perpetual resurgences in which the faculty of starting over prevails over the character acquired and the eagerness to conserve oneself. A life in which nothing is petrified, nothing is irreversible, and which grants, even the apparently most rigid destiny, a margin for play that is the margin of freedom. Then childhood is no longer a pathetic refuge, a disgraceful disguise turned to by the withered old adult, but rather the supplement of an already plentiful existence, the happy overflow for he who, having travelled his journey, can submerge himself again in spontaneity and the charm of earlier times. Then childhood as an almost divine grace can mark the elderly face like premature senility can imprint itself on a young one. Like princess Bibesco said, "It is not more surprising to be born twice than once".
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