Has anyone heard of the puer aeternus? I learnt about it from Christopher Booker’s book Seven Basic Plots. It is a wonderful idea: it is the boy who never grows up. It came to its literary height in Peter Pan, the story written by the diminutive Scot, J.M. Barrie. Peter Pan is the boy who is destined to remain a child. Seven Basic Plots is a great book. Part of Booker’s intention was to explain the structure of the seven plots, and then to explain how they are basically the same. But the other part of his intention was to register a great criticism of the modernity he supposed emerged around the time of Stendhal in the early 19th century: a modernity in which stories started to go wrong. Stories before, say, 1820, according to Booker, always ended in resolution: where resolution took the form of marriage for the comedians like Rosalind and Benedict and death for the tragedians like Macbeth and his Lady. There was an 'inevitability' – to use a T.S. Eliot word – about what happened. Great poetry and drama had inevitability about it. Booker argued that, after 1820, everything changed. Stories no longer resolved. There were no recognition scenes. Dialogue became interminable. Plots were left unfinished. Or they ended with a non sequitur, a moving on to another adventure. There was an obsession with unliterary reality. This obsession, alas, generated a literature far more literary and unrealistic than the one before.
It also meant that characters
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“Becoming Peterson at least means wearing a tie.”
A tie with an elaborately tailored, and no doubt fabulously expensive, clown costume. Have you seen some of this man’s suits? The example in the photo above is one of the more quiet, tasteful ones. That and his ludicrous Canadian accent make me wonder how anyone takes him seriously.
Close your eyes and listen.
My wife and have followed him for years and we are fans ….but..of late, he has started to interview a number of interesting people and he is tending to smother their views with his own statements, which while interesting, is not the point of an interview. Do I detect some self importance creeping in which will ultimately spoil his oft inciteful comments.
You can’t invoke seriousness. Either circumstances provoke it or they don’t. And if they don’t do so for prolonged periods then something nasty will come to fill the gap and feed off your energy. The moment you realise that you are in serious times you can shake the parasite off your back. It is difficult before this point because your rational mind asks, why should I prepare for something arduous when it doesn’t even seem likely? This is not necessarily wrong but it allows for great inequality of preparation.
A good post. Thanks.
C S Lewis thought that adulthood was the silliest time of life.
A child is not childish. In the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth held up children as exemplars of the kingdom of heaven. The child’s trust in and copying of their parents are the same characteristics that Jesus had towards His Father in heaven.
Additionally, a child displays intense concentration in whatever task they are engaged in, such as would have been demonstrated in the bracelet-making workshop in Southport. Again, this singlemindedness is a characteristic of Jesus’s doing of His Father’s will.
Unless one becomes as a child, Jesus declared, it is impossible to enter the kingdom of heaven.
The other characters in novels who don’t grow up are the children in Lewis’s Narnia stories. This has received extensive criticism. There is of course one of Lewis’s characters who notoriously does grow up, and in doing so is ‘no longer a friend of Narnia’.
This is Susan. However, the reason for her ceasing to be a friend is never noticed. This is because it has been repeated so often that Susan is banished from Narnia for wearing lipstick and nylons that everyone has stopped thinking.
A careful reading… Read more »
If you allow the idea of reincarnaton back into your consciousness then everything changes. The cabal know very well about reincarnation and they think in accordance with it to an exquisite degree. You might be more advanced than the next man. This isn’t because you are superior to him it is just that you have incarnated more times.
I don’t know much about him but from what I have seen he seems like a rather brittle and fragile neurotic opportunist who probably wakes up in a different state of mind to that he goes to bed with. This talk about casting aside childish things. It means nothing to declare this and I don’t think that the movement in literature away from a denoument has anything to do with it. When Paul spoke about adulthood he was talking to people who were already on the spiritual path. There was no sense that this would ever pull the masses away from the cloying saccharin reality that they were addicted to.
Puer aeternus: sums up the British population born after the 70s into the cradle-to-grave welfare-state, they stay in the cradle until they die.
“I’m not young enough to know everything”
J. M. Barrie
An excellent read, thank you. I have to say I wear a tie/ cravat when aboard, and don’t subscribe to the kindergarten dress code. When I was growing up we strove to grow up and be accepted into the realms of the adult. Those aspirations have long since disappeared.
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Yes. But it’s very difficult to get a population to grow up in a society driven by a state that insists on making everyone permanently dependent on it.
For healthcare, for education, for retirement, handouts for those not working.
Any time anything goes wrong the braying public cries out for the state to fix it. And the state happily accepts the responsibility and takes for itself the power it needs to pretend to fix the problem.
Against that current, it’s very difficult for people to grow up and take charge.
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Well, isn’t that the truth! And most of those people live far from nature in city bubbles.
“Peter Pan is the boy who is destined to remain a child”
Bit like the current prime minister then?
Two Tier Pier.