Late one night on the winter solstice of 2006, a word and a formula somehow popped into my head. It was quite intriguing. I lit the light and grabbed a pen and paper to jot it down, lest I forget it the next day. While I could still understand it, I wrote it down below:
Childhood Experience
Axiom 1: Childhood has a significant impact on a person’s life.
Example 1: Isn’t it often said that “you can tell a person’s future at the age of three and his old age at the age of seven”?
Axiom 2: Everyone has only one childhood.
Axiom 3: Everyone has only one childhood.
Corollary 1: Due to the irreversibility of growth, childhood has only one chance and one direction to have a significant impact on a person.
Hypothesis 1: Adults may reshape themselves by re-experiencing their childhood.
Theorem 1: Reading literary works is a special way of experiencing life.
Hypothesis 2: Reading literary works about childhood (mainly but not limited to children’s literature) is a special way to experience childhood.
Hypothesis 3: One’s own childhood memories are the most effective channel for childhood experiences.
Conjecture about causality
History and reality are like two connected ponds. If you throw a stone in one, ripples will appear in the other. But you can never be sure how the two interact.
Example 2: Freud’s ideas about the formation of the subconscious and about “libido” all refer to people’s childhood.
Hypothesis 4: If psychoanalysis can change a person’s current situation and future, then the same can be done through childhood experiences.
Question 1: How do you gain a sense of your childhood through reading literature about childhood (primarily children’s literature)? How do you describe it?
Hypothesis: Get reference and reflection from the childhood experiences of others to transcend one’s own limitations, such as men gaining the childhood experiences of women, people with superior living conditions gaining the experience of a miserable childhood, people in peacetime gaining the experience of a childhood in wartime, and so on.
Hypothesis 5: Children’s literature is the most social literary reading. ① It usually requires adults to read to children; ②
Even if adults don’t read to children, they often need to “preview” or intervene in other ways;
Children’s literature originates from the folk tradition of “storytelling”;…
Hypothesis 6: Children’s literature is also literature that educates adults. ① The most common method — adults imitate better educational methods; ②
Adults themselves benefit from it, it has nothing to do with educating children, it is part of self-education.
At least because children’s literature can often show adults who are no longer children:
①
the free, natural side of human beings;
②
The forgotten soul of art;
③
Philosophical Roots Search;
④
The duality of growth—the other side that is suppressed during the growth process;
⑤
the possibility of “living happily ever after”;
…