Richard Hughes
A High Wind in Jamaica (1929)
So much for Rachel. The inside of Laura was different indeed: something vast, complicated, and nebulous that can hardly be put into language. To take a metaphor from tadpoles, though legs were growing her gills had not yet dropped off. Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term “human” a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies of course are not human — they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates.
In reading these descriptions of the inner life of child characters, I found myself thinking of Virginia Woolf and The Waves (1931). And my thoughts wondered to the topic of the representations of children in literature and to the discovery of a bibliography that grows to include a fair-sized niche in queer theory. And I wonder if in some small tidal pool there is not a study of the sea and the child to be found.
And so for day 2823
04.09.2014