There is a phrase I never liked, when people talk of “lost innocence.” Innocence is not, I think, something that can be lost. I do not feel as if my innocence was ever lost. Perhaps they mean that as we grow older, we feel guilt, suspicion, anger, resentment, woundedness, betrayal, callousness, hate, lust, cruelty, that these replace innocence. Confusing. When I feel all these emotions—and as a human being I feel all of it, how does this contradict innocence? What grants them their continual sting, what presupposes the sting, is a white soft sensitivity, an infant’s openness to the world. Innocence is a central experience. The I is innocent. The my, the things we build upon the I, centers upon this innocence, on this lamb soft mew of touch. I can recall no time in my childhood when I felt innocent. I recall anxiety, fear, love, concern, but never did I feel innocent, and never did I not feel innocent. I had no idea of it, had no meaning for it. As we use the term “innocent,” it is sort of a retrojected state we impose on our childhood after we start feeling adulthood guilt.
If we have to believe in Shakespeare, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." (from Hamlet-Act II, scene ii). In believing Shakespeare, the social norms seems to come in direct conflict. As in what if you hurt somebody or hurt yourself? Or what if you commit a sin? Is it not bad? Or should it be not considered bad even if society feels it so? Are judiciary and rules of law merely acting as only moral police, then? The social norms say if you hurt somebody or commit a sin, you are a sinner and your innocence is lost. Innocence as we know it means free from evil, guilt, sin or lacking in sophistication, wordliness, sense of awareness or not knowledgeable and could also mean completely found wanting. On Childhood innocence, it is something innate that no normal adult has.(Consider only till the age of five for this kind of innocence.) A child has no reasoning, no rhyme in touching a hot pot. No normal adult would do that and if one really does, a reasoning that it was done on innocence would have none to buy.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Origen has said, "Men would not be guilty if they did not carry in their mind common notions of morality, innate and written in divine letters." - Fleming ('Vocab. of Phil.')
Had there been no notion about innocence or rather "lost of innocence", these words have lost their meaning.
In fact, no normal adult is really innocent or in other words 'their innocence is lost'. To believe or not to believe is the question, but the answer is "As You Like It".