It’s fun to remember that emotion is a Thing that can be Quantified, and it’s ea

It’s fun to remember that emotion is a Thing that can be Quantified, and it’s easy to forget. I’ve written about it before, but you probably didn’t read it, so I’ll write it again: a baby turns its head due to overstimulation. Its ability or physical capacity for emotion is so limited that it cannot take too much of it at one time. Which is why in the competition for love a child has no chance against his or her mother and/or father – the parent is much more experienced, much more prepared to process huge amounts of love that a child literally cannot handle. Think of all those supernatural encounters, where the alien’s name or the God’s voice is so magnificent that any human attempt to comprehend it would destroy them. It’s sort of like that. It’s sort of like an adult can handle this much medicine, while a child should always be prescribed substantially less.Because we don’t actually quantify emotion or feelings in day-to-day living it is difficult to explain this to a child, it is a concept of which we don’t always have a full understanding, the mother, when she says “You’ll never know how much I love you, wait until you have children of your own,” fails to provide the rational explanation as to why this is the case. And, like every action we take for and around our children that we haven’t studied and scrutinized under a fucking electron microscope, there tends to be deep, un-addressed ripples of negativity that the child will experience, of which through our own forgetful nature we are not aware. A child will feel inadequate in its inability to know much his or her mother loves them, and it will result in loathing, both at the self and the world. How long these ripples will persist, how much of an effect these struggles will have on the child as it turns into an adult, well, probably depends on the person.Coetzee’s memoirs successfully remember these tiny battles he experienced as a child – how he loathes his mother for loving him as much as she does, how he does not respect his father for little reasons cobbled together in his mind but never expressed out loud, how he does not understand how a teacher would want to befriend him just because he does well in class. Any introspective child can relate to spending days struggling with the contradictions and foolishness of the adults around them without ever speaking up once; and any child at all can relate to the self-absorption, the self-importance of only being able to imagine a world directly revolved around themselves and no one else. Coetzee rarely mentions his little brother, and this voluntary exclusion of such a family member feels painfully honest, and we can only imagine how different his younger brother’s childhood memoirs would read.There are recollections of scenes that, even as distanced as he is from them now, you imagine must have still been difficult to write for the author, and this elicits pat-on-the-back, mad props to you sentiments from the reader. And really, pat-on-the-back, mad props to Coetzee, for remembering the ways he tried to hurt the people around him, and remembering all the special ways he was a special little shit. I really liked this book. -- source link

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