My old friends faces don't age

26 Dec, 2024

Not long ago, I entered the fourth decade of my life. And so have, obviously, my contemporaries. People I knew as a kid are now men in their forties, and we look like men in our forties. Some grey hair here, some baldness there, more and more wrinkles. Normal stuff.

When I see a stranger with these features, I think: ah, a forty-ish year old man who looks just like a forty-ish year old man.

But when I see a childhood friend with these features, I very clearly see the face of the boy I knew. I see a boy with some wrinkles and gray hair.

You could argue that this is a cognitive error. That my perception is being distorted by my memories of our childhood. I think this is wrong, and that the opposite is true. Thanks to our shared past I'm able to see see something very real, because the child is still very much part of us. Very likely much more so than we like to admit.

It makes me think of the letter of the poet Ted Hughes to his son ¹:

Nicholas, don’t you know about people this first and most crucial fact: every single one is, and is painfully every moment aware of it, still a child. To get beyond the age of about eight is not permitted to this primate (...) Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. (...)

And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth having, or it’s worth having only as a tool — for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful.

I'm not sure if I'm the only one experiencing this. It would be nice if I could see the child in other people too, even if we didn't grow up together. It's a good basis for real connection:

[W]hen you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It’s an intangible thing. But when they too, sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child.

PS: Yes, the pun in the title is intended.