One of my favorite writers, Michael Chabon, has an Op-Ed in the New York Times today about the censorship of teenage art:
It is in the nature of a teenager to want to destroy. The destructive impulse is universal among children of all ages, rises to a peak of vividness, ingenuity and fascination in adolescence, and thereafter never entirely goes away. Violence and hatred, and the fear of our own inability to control them in ourselves, are a fundamental part of our birthright, along with altruism, creativity, tenderness, pity and love.
He also has a piece in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books about His Dark Materials, a fantasy series. (I haven’t read the review or the books.)
I love Chabon’s baroque, challengingly beautiful sentences. What’s amazing and paradoxical is that he usually uses this style to write about childhood, which is supposed to be a time of innocence and simple pleasures. Chabon knows that’s not true. Like the best artists, he still knows how to be young, but like the best children’s writers, he knows better than to idealize youth. He treats childhood with a mixture of wonder and idealism on the one hand, and fear and complexity on the other. He knows that childhood is scary, and sometimes scarring. Although children may have less experience than adults, that does not make them simple, or always innocent.