To get older, which means to live, is to be increasingly beset by nostalgia. It's easier for kids, whose lives are constantly pushing them forward into new experiences -- from middle- to high-school classes and social life, from challenge to public challenge in the areas of sports, or art, or intellectual endeavor. These changes distract them from the things they're leaving behind. They also really don't have that much behind them yet. This is why it seems odd to my Shakespeare students that Prospero asks his fifteen-year-old daughter to look into the "dark backward and abysm of time" to recall her toddler-hood. "That was only twelve years ago!," they say. I shrug. "Well, it's all the time she's ever known. It probably seems like an abysm to her."
Part of the reason I can see Miranda's twelve years as an abysm (I believe Shakespeare invented that word) is that I myself have been nostalgic since I was old enough to have a memory. When I was three I missed being two. I never wanted to get one minute older than I was, not at ten, not at eight, not at seven. I always knew that being a kid was better than anything to follow. It was a no-brainer. I remember Miss Bender, my third-grade teacher in Bronxville, New York, singing us the song about childhood from
Babes in Toyland: "
For once you pass those golden gates, you can never return again!" I think the whole class started to cry,
