Childish

Racing weight on diet Coke and Marlboro lights

Easy seven this morning.  Pleasant and sunny.

When is it good to be like a child?  It strikes me that we praise people for being childlike but we say they are "childish" when we want to critize.  What's the difference between these two ways of acting like a child?  What traits of children do we want to imitate, which ones do we want to leave behind?  We want to be childlike in our innocence and guilelessness and ability to love without stint, to give ourselves wholly to affection; but to give ourselves wholly and without embarassment to other desires and impulses is, we say, childish. 
Some traits are ambiguous and fall between.  The phrase "childish curiosity" makes as much sense as the phrase "childlike curiosity."

One of my favorite literary critics has a book on Philip Roth called Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity.  The second half of the colon--and where the scatalogical Roth is concerned, the colon is everything--makes it such a great title.  In the line of Melville and Henry James, immaturity is not childlike but takes effort and art; Philip Roth has made his art from the matter of immaturity.  I find Roth an unsettlingly good novelist.  The reasons for his brilliance evade at least my own powers of critical observation.  What he asks along with Melville and James is what maturity consists in, and whether it's worth attaining. 

The problem with curiosity is that it shuttles uncomfortable between the childlike and the childish in an ambiguity that makes it easy to find academics contemptible, as I often do.  No one ever talks about a "mature curiosity:" that's something of an oxymoron, because of curiosity's immediate kinship with desire, to wit, we say: insatiable lust, insatiable appetite, insatiable curiosity.  The child has no mastery over his desires, and yet the academic, ambiguously an adult, possesses untameable curiosity - and, as a practical matter - must if she is to survive to old age in the profession.

Academia values precociousness, each generation of scholars the bright children of the generation prior.  A profession where intelligence is prized above all does not produce and cultivate adults, for whom intelligence is but one professional and personal virtue, but instead churns out graying, pasty schoolchildren, each still a little shocked that he is not the smartest person in the class. 

The astonishing frumpiness of academics has to do with this childishness, I think, for it also means never having to grow into or truly inhabit your body--for the child's body, or the adolescent's, is something still just over the horizon, yet to arrive.  Hence all the coats and skirts and bad, ill-fitting suits of an academic conference.  Successfull academic dress and decorum is a stylized adolescence: clothes, manners that you don't quite know how to wear or pull off.