Read today Gaiman's Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch – quite wonderful. I know that in becoming a Neil Gaiman fan, I'm jumping onto a very large bandwagon, and doing so pretty late in the day – but this one was really a surprise: a slow, dense, atmospheric tour of the shadows and incomprehensibilities of the author's childhood. A time when adults do casual, everyday things – and disturbing ones – at a level that a child can't understand: the whole world of apparent secrets, of illusions that the world conceals great mysteries. In fact, of illusions that adults know what they're doing: that adults actually understand their own actions.
This is probably why P– and I are such good friends: we both had that kind of experience when we were little.
Even though that kind of cluelessness – typical, perhaps, of extreme thinking types – is alarming, or perhaps even frightening, for a child, in that same person as an adult, it would lead to a fascination with figuring things out, with secrets, with Theory (as practiced in literary/cultural circles). The latter, of course, applies rather heavily to me....
Remarkable, the English fascination with Punch and Judy. Actually, it's not that remarkable – the mere fact that such a bizarre, intense thing would exist would certainly leave a mark on many children who saw it.
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