The old look on the young as an elephant looks at a fish

We're born with no experience, and the older a person is the more respected and mysterious their wisdom seems to be to the young.

I love talking to people who are older than me because they talk about such abstract things as marriage, divorce, careers and parenthood... I have absolutely nothing to offer on the subjects and thus probably make poor company for these friends, but they give me a glimpse into a place I feel I might never enter: middle age. 

Because we're born without a voice and we grow our own vocabulary as we age it can be very difficult to make oneself understood while we're little. To worsen the situation our perceived inexperience in terms of years lived is looked on most often with a general disregard. Of what worth or interest is someone with no solid opinions? No background? No fixed grasp on their own reality? It's hard to counter that except to say that children have a psychological liberty from the cemented adult mind that makes their companionship just as interesting as my middle aged friends.

There's poetry in children's speech.

There's injury in the ideal of adulthood.

I remember as a child being impatient for my own adulthood because I felt that once I was there, I would be listened to and asked questions of. I felt that some of the adults I encountered spent very little time listening to or asking anything of me.

I recall a particular event when I pulled out hundreds of sheets of drawings to show to a family friend who I had met maybe a few times beforehand, he seemed kind and his character not too domineering. I remember sitting with him and taking great pains in explaining the narratives pertaining to each of my drawings whilst his wife and my parents talked at the same table. These were ideas I had spent a large amount of time visualising (I was undertaking the project of creating a religion). At the end of my explanations he made an exhausted and sarcastic remark about my use of time. He used false praise to mock my efforts and I found it disquieting and disheartening. I guess he must have been tired and drunk and unenthused by a child's art. He was a nice person, but must have misinterpreted my capacity to read his turn of phrase. 

There are other such events that mark a piercing intersection between outsiders and my private world of artmaking as a child, I won't go into them. 

The seed of truth in all of this is that in any kind of communication, when the other person looks on you (not at you) with a sardonic smile it does not inspire confidence in your value as a person.