Nostalgia

"After being conditioned, as a child, to the lovely never-never land of magic, of fairy queens and virginal maidens, of little princes and their rose bushes, of poignant bears and Eyore-ish donkeys, of life personalized, as the pagans loved it, of the magic wand, and the faultless illustrations (...) all this I knew, and felt, and believed. All this was my life when I was young. To go from this to the world of "grown-up" reality. To feel the tender skin of sensitive child fingers become aware of school, exams, bread and butter, marriage, sex, compatibility, war, economics, death and self. What a patethic blighting of the beauty and reality of childhood. (...) why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream-Mother-Goose world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsability in life?"