Different aspects of time

I wonder what it would be like to experience time this way.  What recollections I have of my early childhood are a few fleeting, vivid impressions that make no sense.

Prior to the age of five, children appear to experience time in a different manner. They are perfectly capable of "forgetting" events that they experienced a minute ago, as well as their mental state when the experience occurred. They seem to think associatively, closer perhaps to the hypnagogic state that one drifts into just before falling asleep, than to one that is ordered around a timeline with a past, present, and future.

Gopnik attempts to penetrate what this different form of consciousness is like. She describes a "false belief" experiment in which children see a closed candy box that, in fact, is filled with pencils:

The children are understandably both surprised and disappointed by this discovery. But then we asked what they thought was in the box when they first saw it. Although they had discovered the truth with great surprise only moments before, they still said that they had always known the box was full of pencils. They had entirely forgotten their earlier false belief.

from book review "What Babies Know and We Don't," by Michael Greenburg

All the futures before us

“The problem of meaning is created by limits, by being just this, by being merely this. The young feel this less strongly. Although they would agree, if they thought about it, that they will realize only some of the (feasible) possibilities before them, none of these various possibilities is yet excluded in their minds. The young live in each of the futures open to them. The poignancy of growing older does not lie in one’s particular path being less satisfying or good than it promised earlier to be — the path may turn out to be all one thought. It lies in traveling only one (or two, or three) of those paths. Economists speak of the opportunity cost of something as the value of the best alternative foregone for it. For adults, strangely, the opportunity cost of our lives appears to us to be the value of all the foregone alternatives summed together, not merely the best other one. When all the possibilities were yet still before us, it felt as if we would do them all.”

— Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (1981)

Found through the blog "more than 95 theses"

Why we speak

Another quote from "Albion":

"The mark or symbol of the hawthorn tree is to be found in the runic alphabet of the ancient British tribes, as if the landscape propelled them into speech."--p. 3

To speak is to name. To name is to know--to make known. Alternatively, to be spoken to is to be known. I never feel like I know a child until she begins to talk to me. From the moment my friend's little girl called me by name and began to chatter away, it was like a door opening into a hallway filled with more doors into more rooms. She was like a seed planted in the earth, and when I returned to check on it, I found a tree antlered with many branches and crowned with many leaves.

If you were mute, and saw a tree--one of those remarkably old trees, like the redwoods in California or the squat dreaming oaks in England--would you be compelled to speak?

Oh, the horror!

I helped a boy with his homework. He came in asking for stuff on 19th century U.S. history. I asked what it was for, and he showed me the questions he had to answer at the back of a chapter in his textbook.

Everything he needed to answer the questions was there in the chapter--he could have copied his answers verbatim. His problem? He didn't want to read.

I forced him to scan the chapter with me. I even pointed out the sections that contained the answers to some of the questions, and asked him what he thought the answer was, but he still resisted the notion of reading.

It's a good thing I don't work all day with children, because such resistance to reading is foreign to me, and I would become highly impatient.