The child might be the beginning and the end of philosophy. Our children bring us up by showing us, through imitation, what we really are. They teach him gentleness, and beat him they teach him mildness of speech, and shout at him they teach him a Stoic apathy to finance, and quarrel before him about the division of their income they teach him honesty, and answer his most profound questions with lies. For the rest he learns by imitation, though his parents think he learns by sermons. Curiosity consumes and develops him he would touch and taste everything from his rattle to the moon. The world is a puzzle to him and these haphazard responses of grasping, biting, and throwing are the pseudopodia, which he puts out to a perilous experience. Watch him, and see how, bit by bit, he learns the nature of things by random movements of exploration. Not till he talks will he leave the ape behind, and begin to climb precariously to the stature of a human being. His mother calls him a “little monkey,” and she is right until he walks he will be like an ape, and even less of a biped, the womb-life having given his funny little legs the incalculable flexibility of a frog’s.
He sees the light only dimly he hears the sounds as muffled and afar. But it is not so nature protects him against this initial onslaught of the world by dressing him in a general insensitivity. Cold strikes his skin, and he seems to be all pain. Can you conceive it-that this queer bundle of sound and pain will come to know love, anxiety, prayer, suffering, creation, metaphysics, death? He cries he has been so long asleep in the quiet warm womb of his mother now suddenly he is compelled to breathe, and it hurts compelled to see light, and it pierces him compelled to hear noise, and it terrifies him. See him, the newborn, dirty but marvelous, ridiculous in actuality, infinite in possibility, capable of that ultimate miracle-growth. Kinder und Narren sprechen die Wahrheit-“Children and fools speak the truth” and somehow they find happiness in their sincerity. We like their unhypocritical candor they do not smile to us when they long for our annihilation. We like them because of what in us is called selfishness-the naturalness and undisguised directness of their instincts. However, we also like them because they are what we would but cannot be-coordinated animals, whose simplicity and unity of action are spontaneous, whereas in the philosopher they come only after struggle and suppression. We like children first of all because they are ours prolongations of our luscious and unprecedented selves.
Like welcome rippling water o’er my heated nerves and flesh. ExcerptĪ group of little children with their ways and chatter flow in, In Durant’s singular voice, here is a message of insight for everyone who has ever sought meaning in life or the counsel of a learned friend while navigating life’s journey.
Fallen Leaves is “a thought-provoking array of opinions” ( Publishers Weekly), offering elegant prose, deep insights, and Durant’s revealing conclusions about the perennial problems and greatest joys we face as a species. In twenty-two short chapters, Durant addresses everything from youth and old age to religion, morals, sex, war, politics, and art. Over the course of Durant’s career he received numerous letters from “curious readers who have challenged me to speak my mind on the timeless questions of human life and fate.” With Fallen Leaves, his final book, he at last accepted their challenge. The culmination of Will Durant’s sixty-plus years spent researching the philosophies, religions, arts, sciences, and civilizations from across the world, Fallen Leaves is the distilled wisdom of one of the world’s greatest minds, a man with a renowned talent for rendering the insights of the past accessible. Praised as a “revelatory” book by The Wall Street Journal, this is the last and most personal work of Pulitzer Prize–winning author and historian Will Durant, discovered thirty-two years after his death.
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