CIAC – LXV INTERNATIONAL COURSE OF ‘ALTA CULTURA’

Everything comes together in childhood: development, memory, training and destiny. Time seems to tell us that "the future is in the beginning". As Virgil’s ‘Puer’ guided the re-birth of the golden age, so the recollection of childhood, be it repressed (Freud) or ‘remembered’ (Proust), defines our identity.

But childhood is also the uncertain place of those who "do not know how to speak" (infans) and who are the object of others’ plans, conditioned by upbringing, schooling and the workplace. In the proletarian world, which still reigns in many parts of the world, it was children, not capital, that counted. Offspring, in itself, is the fruit of nature, which is, in turn, prolific, the mother of all creation. Nature’s children, however, are becoming more and more artificial and eugenic. The ‘street kids’ of Latin America and ‘the TV generation’ bred in a West of frenetic solitude are increasingly abandoned.

In our mythical imagination, childhood is no longer a playful compensation free from the increasingly rigid habits and manias of the senex. Huey, Duey and Louie have been replaced by the Niño, the subterranean impulse of every climatic change and the wrath of Nature, of which we are both accomplices and spectators.

Society once required a long coming of age and initiation: childhood, pre-adolescence, adolescence, youth. Adulthood was hard-won, sanctioned only after passing various civic and cultural rites, ranging from academic ‘maturity’ to service in the military forces. Today’s childhood, however, is brief: very little is forbidden to minors while a great deal is offered for their consumption. The role of family and school has diminished and new means of precarious aggregation have taken their place. The crisis in the notion of authority makes the role of duty and the source of merit uncertain.

Today’s childhood mirrors the anxieties of a society that thinks little of the future and rarely ‘waits for meaning’. Childhood was once, in the words of Roland Barthes, a place where the rhythm of life counted more than the action or the object itself, caught up as it was in "the fascination of everyday life without occurrences".

In the new century, will we know how to maintain these clairières, these islands of light and meaning in the dense crowding of events?