Mary Beard, Women in Power
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
there will be a moment when you realize you are more grown up than your parents are. this is the loss of childhood, my love. it is when you’re standing in the kitchen and one of your parents is screaming about something and you recognize: you will let them win the fight not because you are wrong, but simply because you know that they will keep shouting unless you drop the subject. you expect them to have childish understandings of things. they will hold onto their concept of the world as if it was not a changing thing. they must be right, and they must be somehow more right than you, always, in everything. their idea of control is so necessary to who they are that you just let it go.
this is the moment. you are 11 or 17 or 21. and you realize that you’re more mature than they ever were.
and in some odd, sad way, this frees you. where they have stagnated, you continue.
When the sun came by you opened up your eyes Oh brother, will you let me in again? Oh sister, I am stumbling again Oh Sophie, will you be my good friend? Oh Sophie, will you be here in the end? Then you whispered in my ear, “I am lost, but you’re here.”
Charles Baudelaire, from ‘The Metamorphoses of the Vampire’
The Black Sea at night, Ivan Aivazovsky, oil on canvas, 1879.