Startled by the Connections...

It startled me to read in Annie Dillard's For the Time Being:

They also see, moments before birth, all the mingled vastness of the universe, and its volumes of time, and its multitudes of peoples trampling the generations under. These unborn children are in a holy state. An angel comes to each one, however, just before he is born, and taps his lips so he forgets all he knows and joins the bewildered human race. "This 'forgetting' desanctifies him, of course," Lis Harris notes, so to "console" him, his "fellow fallible mortals" throw him a party. (Dillard, 96)

Doesn't this sound familiar?? I highlighted this passage late last week while curled up in bed with a box of tissues and chicken soup. In my cold medicine haze I recognized that it was significant but now, flipping back through to remember what I had been reading, I see how much it connects to a discussion we had earlier in the semester.

We have talked about "Illo Tempore" or the Great Time, the Before Time, or the "good old days" as they are some times referred to,  as being a time that humanity wants to get back to. It was a time of mythologies and innocence; a time before the fall. In the Bible it was when Man and God could walk together in the Garden of Eden before sin entered the world. But just as it says in the Four Quartets "Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality" I would argue that human kind cannot bear very much perfection either. Eve takes the fruit, shares it with Adam, and human kind gains knowledge of good and evil, making themselves like God and losing their all access pass to the Garden. This is one example of the loss of "illo temore" or a loss of innocence. 

Dr. Sexson brought up an idea last week that has been ruminating in my mind about how language relates to "illo tempore." The idea was that as a baby or a small child, before you learn to speak, you are still in "illo tempore." It is the process of learning language that kicks you out of the metaphorical garden. Language is a ridiculously powerful tool. Once we learn a language it becomes the filter though which we see the world, think, and express ourselves. There is some controversy over if language actually controls thought. A valid argument can be made for this idea. It is difficult (and sometimes impossible) to fully understand things we have no words for. For example, when learning a second language there are words and phrases that have no direct translation and, if you were to directly translate them, it would come out illogically. Also we think in words most of the time (yes, there are thoughts that are visual or just feelings but these are less common). George Orwell's novel 1984 controls the thoughts of the masses by simply making certain words illegal so that eventually they do not exist at all. In "Newspeak," the fictional language used to control thought by Big Brother, words like "freedom" "rebellion" and "love" would all be illegal or a "thoughtcrime" because they are not ideas that Big Brother wants to exist. The punishment for thinking, or saying these things is death. Though an extreme (and fictional) example, it shows how important language is. 

I seem to have gone off on several tangents here but let me try to get back to my original point. The quote from Annie Dillard is about how babies, before they are born, know everything and then are forced to forget. This connects to the idea of "illo tempore" because when the baby is forced to forget he or she is forced out of the garden, out of "illo tempore." It also connects to a discussion we had about how nothing is ever learned, it is only ever remembered. I think this means I have a lot more to remember...