Interpreting a Hard World

When I was a child of nine or ten, the world suddenly seemed hard. I mean this literally. Not that life was hard in some metaphorical way, but that everything from the porcelain sky through the shiny leaves and silver bark of maples in summer to the granular asphalt under my feet had an impenetrable quality. I was outside this world, and I found this alarming, discomfiting, depressing. This feeling overwhelmed me at times, especially on bright days when the sun mercilessly picked out the infinite detail of the world.

That the world was this way didn’t seem like my active perception of it so much as an intrusion from “out there,” and I struggled against it, mentally trying to soften things up, to penetrate their surfaces, or, although I wasn’t aware of this at the time, to become one with them again.

But there was nothing I could do, there was, then, nothing to do about it. This feeling of otherness, of separation, was simply a fact of my existence, but one that I clearly had not noticed before.

For several years—until I was 15 or 16—I could summon this feeling at will, immerse myself in it, experience it, examine it anew. But this ability faded, and now I have only a memory of it.

I forgot about all of this for decades.

And then, a few weeks ago, something about the brightness of the sunlight (the leaves are off the trees), perhaps, triggered a memory, and it all came flooding back.

As an older person, I can begin to interpret this sense I had then. Small children are connected to the world and their parents, at first literally and then, for years and years, metaphorically and, without effort to reconnect, increasingly tenuously. I believe I experienced something of my separation—from my parents and family, but also from creation at large—something of my growing individuality, in seeing the appearance of the world as so impenetrable.

That the world so all-of-a-sudden took on this hard quality implies that it wasn’t that way before this, when I was one, two, three, or eight. That is, that my perception of it was different, that what I found now, by comparison, must have been different. I can only say that the metaphorical inside of the world was still united with its outside. (For Barfield, consciousness is “the inside of the whole world.”) And then these split.