Innocence and experience

I’m re-reading Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights trilogy. I first read it nearly seven years ago.

He is a fantastic writer. He really, really knows what he’s doing. He deftly introduces scenes, and propels and twists the plot, and pretty much holds you in the palm of his hand. The characters are compelling, the dialogue is effortless, the landscapes you pass through make you gasp with awe. One of the things he does best is describe animals, and this is where a great deal of the charm of these books lie. The characters live in a world where your soul exists outside your body, in the form of a ‘daemon’: a sort of familiar in the shape of an animal. This really is quite lovely because you are never alone – your daemon is your constant companion and you love each other fiercely. The type of creature your daemon is reveals a lot about your personality. Children’s daemon’s differ from adults’ daemons in that they are not fixed: they can change effortlessly from a mouse to a hawk to a panther and back again.

The books muse constantly on the difference between innocence and experience, childhood and adulthood. The central mystery of the books is the idea of ‘dust’ – a special substance invisible to the eye but which is discovered to be attracted to adults but not to children. It turns out that ‘dust’ has a lot to do with consciousness. The Church, in the books, is very suspicious of ‘dust’, and even sets out to try to eradicate it. They equate ‘dust’ with sin.

Anyway it’s got me thinking about the difference between children and adults, and it’s making my brain hurt. Because there’s not a line that you cross when you turn thirteen when suddenly you think differently and you’re not a child any more. But the difference between thinking as a child and thinking as an adult is more than an accumulation of experiences. Aren’t even teenagers’ brains still developing, so that although in many ways they are like inexperienced adults there are actually some types of thinking they can’t do yet? (I’m not sure about this but I do remember hearing it somewhere.)

There are so very many things to think about here. But it is interesting to try to remember what it felt like to be a child. I remember very clearly what it felt like to be seven, and what it felt like to be ten. There was a very very big difference between the two. Ten was a whole lot more complicated. Twelve and thirteen were more complicated again, but they had more in common with ten than ten did with seven.

The day I turned seven, my great grandmother died. This made me sad, in a sort of undefined way. For my birthday, I got a musical kaleidoscope. It played a tune, and turned all on its own. I loved the jeweled patterns it made with light. I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world.

For my tenth birthday, I got my ears pierced. I was ambivalent about it. In the weeks before, I would finger my soft smooth earlobes and think – they will never be the same again. I liked my earrings once I got them, although my ears were inflamed for weeks. I also had a really great birthday party, but I was terribly stressed about it. I could invite ten friends. We went iceskating. And we came back to my place. Mum had organized hair ribbons, with special fabric puff-paints so that everyone could paint their own ribbon. I was so embarrassed and nervous that my friends would think it too childish. They didn’t. They loved it.