{"id":38562,"date":"2019-05-26T01:00:37","date_gmt":"2019-05-26T05:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38562"},"modified":"2019-04-26T08:40:40","modified_gmt":"2019-04-26T12:40:40","slug":"qotd-maurice-sendak-on-childhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/05\/26\/qotd-maurice-sendak-on-childhood\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Maurice Sendak on childhood"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ll begin our tribute to Maurice Sendak with an excerpt of our 1986 interview, in which he told me that when he was a child, adults looked big and grotesque to him, and he couldn’t imagine ever becoming one.<\/p>\n

MAURICE SENDAK: It was inconceivable to me as a child that I would be an adult. I mean, one assumed that it would happen, but obviously it didn’t happen, or if it did, it happened when your back was turned, and then suddenly you were there. So I couldn’t have thought about it much.<\/p>\n

TERRY GROSS: Because adults seemed really big and different, you couldn’t imagine becoming one?<\/p>\n

SENDAK: And awful. Yeah. I mean they were mostly dreadful, and if the option were to become an adult was to become another dreadful creature, then best not, although I think there had to be a kind of normal anticipation of that moment happening because being a child was even worse.<\/p>\n

I mean, being a child was being a child — was being a creature without power, without pocket money, without escape routes of any kind. So I didn’t want to be a child.<\/p>\n

I remember how much — when I was a small boy I was taken to see a version of Peter Pan<\/em>. I detested it. I mean the sentimental idea that anybody would want to remain a boy, I don’t — I couldn’t have thought it out then, but I did later, certainly, that this was a conceit that could only occur in the mind of a very sentimental writer, that any child would want to remain in childhood. It’s not possible. The wish is to get out.<\/p>\n

“‘Fresh Air’ Remembers Author Maurice Sendak”, NPR Books<\/em><\/a>, 2012-05-08.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’ll begin our tribute to Maurice Sendak with an excerpt of our 1986 interview, in which he told me that when he was a child, adults looked big and grotesque to him, and he couldn’t imagine ever becoming one. MAURICE SENDAK: It was inconceivable to me as a child that I would be an adult. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,41],"tags":[374,134],"class_list":["post-38562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-quotations","tag-children","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-a1Y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38562"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48053,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38562\/revisions\/48053"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}