The tricky thing was, indeed, to refuse my older and more experienced self any space in the text. Everyone wants to be clever—it’s hard to give up that side and go blindly for stupidity. But even more frightening was the fact that it was so easy—that this combination of cockiness and cluelessness, as you so precisely pin it down, was apparently still very close to my present self. (...).

(...).

(...). When I look back at that freedom of childhood, which is in a way infinite, and at all the joy and the intense happiness, now lost, I sometimes think that childhood is where the real meaning of life is located, and that we, adults, are its servants, that that’s our purpose.