The notion of this powerful childhood gaze was all the more specious given that adults, in the name of that very spontaneity, subjected chidren to every sort of rehearsed and prepackaged foolishness so that what children were supposed to see and like was no more than the adults' idea of what they imagined having lost themselves, which in turn was probably no more than other versions of childhood recycled by other adults, this cycle of loss building itself up according to the endless demands of nostalgia, so that the older and more rotten the world became, the more this driveling idocy prevailed and this idea of innocence took hold. Grown-ups tried to sweeten the pill, but there was no hiding it, children were the most oppressed creatures on earth.

Autor: Jean-Christophe Valtat