Flower Seller with Child, Victor-Gabriel Gilbert

PRESENT WITH her Amish family unloading flowers at a rural Pennsylvania produce stand today, a little girl of about five years looked up for a moment, puzzled and curious. They arrived in a buggy pulling a wagon crammed full of bouquets. While her brothers and mother emptied the cart, she shyly waited for them in the background. It could have been the 17th century or the 15th. There was nothing in what they were doing that was new or cool.

I wondered what this girl, who was dressed in a long skirt, her head covered with a purple scarf, makes of her glimpses of the modern world, of the whizzing cars, of the passengers — some so obese that they have trouble walking, of the children who whine out loud and seem not to stand still. She lives far removed from all that. I have never seen an Amish child insolently talking back to parents. It probably happens, but they seem so busy being children. This little girl has probably never watched TV. She may never ride in an airplane or play on a beach in a bathing suit or ride a roller coaster or stand in a sports arena. She may never have “deconstructed” jeans or purple hair. She will miss out. But she has some of the best things a child can have. She has many siblings and fresh air. She has a mother who is not taught to be ashamed of being a woman. She has a father who is a man. She has hard work. Or she will soon. She has constant lessons in self-restraint. Already you can see certain qualities in her face: patience and self-deprecation.

You can see another thing: innocence. It’s an unmistakeable and intangible quality that comes from not knowing. Children should be oblivious. They don’t need to know. They need not to know. The producers of popular culture hate innocence. This girl’s innocence won’t be systematically destroyed by the world around her. The Amish were truly wise to turn their backs on it all.

The kingdom of adults grows stale when there are few true children left. We don’t know what we’re missing because it’s not there. Innocence deeply motivates and energizes adults. But then I suppose you have to have known it to appreciate it. You have to have known what it is like to believe, however temporarily, that you are surrounded by goodness, safety and protection. Innocence is only delusion to those who believe that paradise doesn’t exist. If only a child could explain those moments in between the boredom and the waiting.

A delicate flower may bloom majestically in its field with no awareness of all the diseases that could afflict it or that ugliness rules. It doesn’t need to know. Let the world have its sophistication. Every real child, its innocence slowly unfolding, is a small, inarticulate condemnation of modernity. The flowers in the field can’t explain either.

It’s very difficult to be a flower unless you were once a seed. It’s very difficult to be an adult unless you were once a child.

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