On this Greek island, I am gaining much vicarious enrichment seeing the world anew through the eyes of my 10-year-old son
I wage a losing battle in my house over the use of the word "literally". "I'm not actually joking, Alice, we saw this apple and it was literally as big as a house," is the sort of sentence – with the requisite upspeak intonation – that brings out the grumpy pedant in my children's father. "Please, please," I plead. "Can't we use the word literally, well, just a little more literally." The kids raise their eyes to heaven, sniggering over my middle-aged fussiness.
Meaning is use, they might one day argue back. But this morning I found huge delight in my 10-year-old son Felix's use of "literally". "I'm not actually joking, Alice," he said, "the sea is literally blue."
My son and I are on the small Greek island of Naxos. We are having a few days of half-term father/son bonding and reading Greek myths together. On this island, Dionysus wooed Ariadne away from Theseus, giving her the stars as a wedding crown. Felix has never been this far from home, and so much of the surrounding culture and geography is being experienced as new and extraordinary. Our friend Dimitrios explains to him the Greek alphabet. He tries a grilled sardine (not good) and, in the spirit of Dionysus, a few sips of my beer (better). The Orthodox church is full of strange icons, candles and exotic smells. He is noticing the girls. And the sea is literally blue. His eyes are as wide as saucers.
There is much vicarious enrichment to be had in seeing the world anew through the eyes of a child. The landscape is repopulated with wonder. The world-weary "been there, done that" adult is reminded of what he or she has stopped noticing or being shocked or excited by. It feels like just the sort of renewal that is supposed to come with a holiday. I want to suspend my disbelief and be 10 again. I want what Nietzsche called a "second innocence".
Nietzsche's intellectual prescription for this was that atheism must first triumph. We must first fully divest ourselves of the gods only then to return to something called the sacred. He returns to Dionysus. I return to the God of the little white churches that are scattered all over the island. But what is it, then, that atheism is supposed to burn away? For too many enlightenment thinkers, it is the credulity of childhood. So too with St Paul, we are called "to put away childish things". We are called intellectually to grow up. But I want to be a grown up and a child at the same time. I want binocular vision.
Not that this little pop at the enlightenment is a pop exclusively at the atheistic enlightenment. My particular derision is reserved for all those who insist that religion is either literally true or not true at all. Fundamentalism is just as much a product of bad enlightenment thinking as are those aspects of contemporary atheism that claim the only thing worth saying about the Greek myths is that they are untrue. Of course they are not untrue. Something can be true and not literally true. This is what the child sees. Perhaps that is why my children are so relaxed about the word literally. And maybe they are right.
Holidays are, of course, originally holy-days. Not just ways of recharging our batteries so that we can return more effectively to the world of work. At best, they are about relearning enchantment. Discovering second innocence. There is nothing wrong with the intellectual astringent of hard-nosed empiricism, in the right place.
But if the world is only populated by things that can be weighed or counted, then the world is too easily conscripted by material production. Though, to be fair, the poor Greeks could use a bit more material production at the moment.
Twitter: @giles_fraser
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