The Child Character Analysis

Does the boy watch all this, I wonder? And what does he make of it? What species does he think he might belong to? Does he recognize his own?

I lie in the dark of the forest waiting for the moon. And softly, nearby, there are footsteps. A deer. The animal’s face leads toward me. I am filled with tenderness for it. Its tongue touches the surface of me, lapping a little. It takes part of me into itself, but I do not feel at all diminished.

He is not at all beautiful, as I had imagined the Child must be. But I am filled with a tenderness, an immense pity for him, a need to free him into some clearer body, that is like a pain in my own.

All that will tie him to us, a new life, is invisibly there, he must feel it: the web of feeling that is this room, the strings—curiosity, a need to find out the usefulness to him of all these objects that surround him, and the way they define and illuminate the uses of his own body—these are the threads that hold him now, and along which his mind must travel to discover how he is connected to us.

All this world is alive for [the Child]. It is his sphere of knowledge, a kind of library of forms that he has observed and committed to memory, another language whose hieroglyphs he can interpret and read.

Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. The creatures will come creeping back—not as gods transmogrified, but as themselves. Beaked, furred, fanged, tusked, clawed, hooved, snouted, they will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness. And after them, the plants, also themselves.

The language I am speaking of now, that I am almost speaking, is a language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation. We knew that language once. I spoke it in my childhood. We must discover it again.

All these weeks I have been following my own plan for the Child, and have never for one moment thought of him as anything but a creature of my own will, a figure in my dream. Now, as he kneels in the snow, howling, tearing his face with his nails, I have a vision of his utter separateness that terrifies me. I have no notion of what pain he is suffering, what deep sense of loss and deprivation his cries articulate.

If I thought we might find [the Child] in the spring, I would let him go. But that is impossible. Having brought him in among us there is no way back. Already, in the warmth of the room, he is losing his capacity to withstand cold. […] Out there he would freeze. Whatever his secret was, I have taken it from him.

What else should life be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful setting out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become […] What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?

The days pass, and I cease to count them. The river is far behind us. […] I no longer ask myself what we are making for. The notion of a destination no longer seems necessary to me. It has been swallowed up in the immensity of this landscape, as the days have been swallowed up by the sense I now have of a life that stretches beyond measurable time.

Does the boy watch all this, I wonder? And what does he make of it? What species does he think he might belong to? Does he recognize his own?

I lie in the dark of the forest waiting for the moon. And softly, nearby, there are footsteps. A deer. The animal’s face leads toward me. I am filled with tenderness for it. Its tongue touches the surface of me, lapping a little. It takes part of me into itself, but I do not feel at all diminished.

He is not at all beautiful, as I had imagined the Child must be. But I am filled with a tenderness, an immense pity for him, a need to free him into some clearer body, that is like a pain in my own.

All that will tie him to us, a new life, is invisibly there, he must feel it: the web of feeling that is this room, the strings—curiosity, a need to find out the usefulness to him of all these objects that surround him, and the way they define and illuminate the uses of his own body—these are the threads that hold him now, and along which his mind must travel to discover how he is connected to us.

All this world is alive for [the Child]. It is his sphere of knowledge, a kind of library of forms that he has observed and committed to memory, another language whose hieroglyphs he can interpret and read.

Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. The creatures will come creeping back—not as gods transmogrified, but as themselves. Beaked, furred, fanged, tusked, clawed, hooved, snouted, they will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness. And after them, the plants, also themselves.

The language I am speaking of now, that I am almost speaking, is a language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation. We knew that language once. I spoke it in my childhood. We must discover it again.

All these weeks I have been following my own plan for the Child, and have never for one moment thought of him as anything but a creature of my own will, a figure in my dream. Now, as he kneels in the snow, howling, tearing his face with his nails, I have a vision of his utter separateness that terrifies me. I have no notion of what pain he is suffering, what deep sense of loss and deprivation his cries articulate.

If I thought we might find [the Child] in the spring, I would let him go. But that is impossible. Having brought him in among us there is no way back. Already, in the warmth of the room, he is losing his capacity to withstand cold. […] Out there he would freeze. Whatever his secret was, I have taken it from him.

What else should life be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful setting out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become […] What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer change?

The days pass, and I cease to count them. The river is far behind us. […] I no longer ask myself what we are making for. The notion of a destination no longer seems necessary to me. It has been swallowed up in the immensity of this landscape, as the days have been swallowed up by the sense I now have of a life that stretches beyond measurable time.