Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.
Interpretation
Children are part of the same reality as adults, and trying to shield them from it is both unrealistic and self-serving.
In this quote, Lionel Shriver emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the shared reality between children and adults. Rather than attempting to shelter children from the complexities and challenges of the world, which can be seen as a form of vanity and naivety, we should prepare them to navigate it. This perspective advocates for honest communication and the gradual introduction of children to the world's realities, fostering resilience and understanding.
In practice
This quote could be used in a seminar about parenting and childhood education.
Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.
In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
From this I conclude that the best education for the situations of actual life consists of the experience we acquire from the study of serious history. For it is history alone which without causing us harm enables us to judge what is the best course in any situation or circumstance.
I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
Some people read so little they have rickets of the mind.
If you invest in a girl or a woman, you are investing in everybody else.
I think education is power. I think that being able to communicate with people is power. One of my main goals on the planet is to encourage people to empower themselves." Another "I was raised to believe that excellence is the deterrent to racism and sexism. And that's how I operate my life." And another "It does not matter who you are or where you came from. The ability to triumph begins with you. Always.
Now...in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, ipods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
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