1
" If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope some of it might open our eyes a little. We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves those memories of play that no one regrets, and that are almost the only things an old man can look back on with complete satisfaction. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do. "
― Anthony Esolen , Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
6
" ...friendship stands as a small affront to the total control of all things by mass entertainment and mass media and mass education and mass politics. For wherever such friendships persist, there persists the possibility of imaginative leaps that threaten the comfort of the banal. For you look at the friend and you remember the past, and treasure it. You love the friend, and suddenly you understand that this life of ours cannot fully be described by the motion of particulate matter in empty space. You see instantly that politics fades into unimportance, with all its noisy glamour and empty promises. You feel that others before you have known what it is to have the true friend, the one before whom you can, as Cicero put it, think out loud. You feel that, and it is like an earnest of eternity, of being grounded in a a love and beauty and goodness that is at the heart of all ages, and that transcends them all. Pals we may have, in the flatlands of contemporary life. Political allies, sure. Coworkers, aplenty. But not friends. "
― Anthony Esolen , Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
8
" The past is dangerous, not least because it cannot go away. It is simply there, never to change, and in its constancy it reflects the eternity of God. It presents to the young mind a vast field of fascination, of war and peace, loyalty and treason, invention and folly, bitter twists of fate and sweet poetic justice. When that past is the past of one's people or country or church, then the danger is terrible indeed, because then the past makes claims upon our honor and allegiance. Then it knocks at the door, saying softly, "I am still here." And then our plans for social control—for inducing the kind of amnesia that has people always hankering after what is supposed to be new, without asking inconvenient questions about where the desirable thing has come from and where it will take us—must fail. For a man with a past may be free; but a man without a past, never. "
― Anthony Esolen , Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
9
" The imagination opens out not principally to what it knows and finds familiar, but to what it does not know, what it finds strange, half hidden, robed with inaccessible light. The familiar too can be an object of wonder, but not by its familiarity: as when the hills I looked upon every morning of my youth suddenly seemed to reveal the thousands of years they were building, long before any man ever left his traces on their slopes. Even the dog at my heels, then, like the dog who wagged his tail when Tobias and he finally came home, reveals itself the more, and is the greater object of wonder, the more I turn to it in love and see that, after all, I do not know him; for a dog too proclaims the wisdom of God.
It is, in the first instance, the very idea of God that guarantees that we can never reduce anything in creation merely to the stuff of which it consists. And, as for God Himself, what greater object of wonder can there be than one who is not the greatest thing-in-the-world, but beyond the world, of whom all things great and small declare, “He made us, we did not make ourselves”? "
― Anthony Esolen , Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
11
" If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope that some of it might open our own eyes a little. We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves those memories of play that no one regrets, and that are almost the only things an old man can look back on with complete satisfaction. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do. "
― Anthony Esolen , Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
16
" Now take the child from that mother, and place him somewhere else. Not in another home, among different people who love him—and who will be sources of mystery to him, too. Not with his Aunt Violet or with his grandmother, nor even with the kind old lady next door. Place him with—here is the crucial word—a professional. Place him in the context of a money-making—here is another crucial word—industry. Take him to those functional places with tellingly abstract and impersonal names, like the Early Learning Center, or the Tiny Tots Academy. Place him among professional caregivers, rather like people who will walk and feed your dog at the kennel, only much nicer. They will feed the child, will parcel out the child's day with appropriate Learning Activities, will enforce the scheduled Naptime, and will send him home clean, well-fed, generally contented, runny-nosed, patted, played with, and unloved. Thus will his natural hunger for love be filled instead with the pleasantly functional. He will have no complaints about the Choo-Choo Child Connection. It may, in fact, be the only time in his day that he will run into other children. And he will be all the readier for school. Not only because he will be able to say his ABC’s. He will be ready to see himself and everyone else in the school as ciphers in an institution built to serve a certain function. Charles "
― Anthony Esolen , Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
