Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

There is yet another sensitive subject to touch upon. A safe space to me who is a fully grown-up human being is a place where I can be left alone without being compelled to make consumeristic choices of any sort, sexual choices among them. (Please accept the obvious idea that each sexual contact separated from any long-term involvement and its obligations becomes exactly a small adventure to consume, nothing more.) We can, and we do sometimes afford ourselves this luxury of being left in peace. However, we do not allow it to our children who need it more than any of us does. We forcefully make them face the contemporary reality of sexual life, we literally force them to make choices we as adults are so often happy to refrain from, and we ignore the fact that some of these choices forced upon a young person who doesn’t yet see the full range of their consequences can never be corrected afterwards. A school like this is in my humble opinion anything else but a green zone.

Unfortunately, it also fails to be a yellow area. We do not let children be children in a proper sense because giving room for their self-invented games is ‘careless’ and ‘irresponsible’ in the light of the competitive job market of today. At the same time, we do not allow them to be adults because we ourselves seem to have effectively unlearned how to be ones. We will never let the young Petya go to war because we have long forgotten how to sharpen his sabre, to provide you with a metaphor. In a world from which danger is successfully eliminated and where no hard choices must be met, in a world where we as adults do not have to be adults any more it makes perfect sense to prolong the puberty of our children for as long period as it is possible.

All these thoughts are essentially my own—but I was very happy to stumble upon them in Lost Icons, a book written by Revd Rowan Williams who used to be the archbishop of Canterbury for ten years. He had to quit this position in 2012—because he, while holding it, tended to ask a great number of ‘childish’ questions which behaviour is never looked upon very favourably for a clergyman of a high rank. The book was written in 1997 as still is in my opinion a highly recommendable reading—you would be uncomfortably surprised to discover how contemporarily it reads. A personal note: at one moment of my long stay here in Britain, I had a painful urge to reconnect with my native culture; a book entitled Lost Icons seemed to be a perfect device for that. To be sure, Dr Williams deals with icons in a more general sense (even though he does say a few words about the famous Trinity of Andrei Rublev) and comes to regard as icons those important parts of our culture that appear to be irretrievably lost, ‘childhood’ being one of them.