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Quotations from Father and Son: Biographical Recollections by Edmund Gosse (chapter 1)

I cant help but compare my adolescence to such a one as this:


"The peculiarities of a family life, founded upon such principles, are, in relation to a little child, obvious; but I may be permitted to recapitulate them. Here was perfect purity, perfect intrepidity, perfect abnegation [denial of self]; yet there was also narrowness, isolation, an absence of humanity."


He follows:

"So confident were they of the reality of their intercourse with God, that they asked for no other guide. They recognized no spiritual authority among me, they subjected themselves to no priest or minister, they troubled their consciences about no current manifestation of 'religious opinion.' They lived in an intellectual cell, bounded at its sides by the walls of their own house, but open above to the very heart of the uttermost heavens.

This, then, was the scene in which the soul of a little child was planted, not as in an ordinary open flower-border or carefully tended social parterre [an ornamental flower garden having the beds and paths arranged to form a pattern], but as on a ledge, split in the granite of some mountain. The ledge was hung between night and the snows on one hand, and the dizzy depths of the world upon the other; was furnished with just soil enough for a gentian to struggle skywards and open its stiff azure stars; and offered no lodgement, no hope of salvation, to any rootlet which should stray beyond its inexorable [unyielding or unalterable] limits."



I want so much to understand the world in which I grew up; a showing of intense 'godliness' (or a form thereof) and spiritual gain, yet an absence of freedom to be human. What was my heritage seeking if their spirituality did not coalesce with true human experience?

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