'Not Disposed to Make Concessions to the World'

Philip Larkin, famously childless, first drafted “Take One Home for the Kiddies” in 1954. Then it was titled “Pets.” He completed the retitled poem on this date, August 13, in 1960, and included it in The Whitsun Weddings (1964): 

“On shallow straw, in shadeless glass,

Huddled by empty bowls, they sleep:

No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass -

Mam, get us one of them to keep.

 

“Living toys are something novel,

But it soon wears off somehow.

Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel --

Mam, we’re playing funerals now.”

 

Kids can be fickle, lazy and easily bored. So can adults. Parents will buy a pet for their children as a way to teach them responsibility and sometimes the theory works. In the sixties we had a Siamese cat named Ming Tai, a beautiful creature. We attached her leash to the clothesline in the back yard so she could enjoy the outdoors without escaping. We were told never to leave her unsupervised. One day my brother wandered off, the cat climbed the apple tree and hanged herself. A little later, my maternal grandmother gave me a caiman, a scaled-down alligator, mostly to irritate my parents, I suspect. I kept her in a shallow glass container, a sort of a casserole dish, and fed her raw ground beef. One summer day I left her on the picnic table in the backyard. When I returned, she was gone, probably to the creek that flowed at the bottom of the hill behind our house.

 

At the conclusion of his great essay “On Being Conservative” (Rationalism in Politics, 1962), Michael Oakeshott writes:

 

“Everybody’s young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. Nothing in them has a fixed shape, nothing a fixed price; everything is a possibility, and we live happily on credit. There are no obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept. Nothing is specified in advance; everything is what can be made of it. The world is a mirror in which we seek the reflection of our own desires.”

 

Oakeshott’s point is that childhood, depending on our perspective, is at the same time paradise and, potentially, hell. Kids aren’t born with responsibility and good judgment. For most, those are learned virtues, though the myth of childhood innocence persists. We cherish memories of the freedom and sense of promise we knew as kids. Then it’s time to grow up – sadly but necessarily. We know the disasters childish adults can conjure. Oakeshott continues:

 

“The allure of violent emotions is irresistible. When we are young we are not disposed to make concessions to the world; we never feel the balance of a thing in our hands -- unless it be a cricket bat [!]. We are not apt to distinguish between our liking and our esteem; urgency is our criterion of importance; and we do not easily understand that what is humdrum need not be despicable.”