No one tells you that, if you are lucky, you might get eight years that feel like an entire life. Eight eternal years. In the private arithmetic by which I understand my own existence, the first four are largely beyond recall; then come the years between roughly four and twelve, when the world is enormous and there is still room to believe that everything I love will somehow remain. After that, reality begins to make itself understood. Its arrival takes years, and some of its lessons are still arriving now. Yet I feel a boundary there, a division between the life I inhabited without knowing what it was and the life I have spent trying to understand. So much of my adulthood has become a museum for those eight years, and a tribute to them. I keep finding another thing to preserve.
The numbers belong to the feeling. Early memory has no precise starting line: fragments survive, others disappear, and even a child can lose access to events they once remembered clearly. Researchers who have followed children over time have watched that forgetting happen. What remains of our beginnings is partial, unevenly lit. Nor does everyone have the privilege of a childhood that can later be mourned as a refuge. The words “if we are lucky” carry the weight of that difference. I am thinking of the years in which enough safety and enchantment survive for us to feel, afterwards, that we once lived somewhere we can no longer reach. Some people receive far less of that time. When I say eight years, I am trying to give a measure to the strange disproportion between how briefly that world existed and how much of me still lives there.
A childhood afternoon could contain a scale of experience that I struggle to recover from whole adult months. There was time to become absorbed in something without also watching myself become absorbed, without measuring its usefulness or feeling another obligation pressing against it. A story could occupy the whole available space. Its music belonged to the room in which I heard it, and the room belonged to the people who were there, and those people seemed as permanent as the walls. I had no reason to separate these things. Years later, I can replay the music and discover that it has brought back an atmosphere I could never have described while I was inside it. I miss the ease with which I once gave myself to experience. I miss how little distance there was between something being beautiful and my being happy.
My childhood in Italy remains part of that interior world. The programmes and comic voices I encountered there, the stories that reached me during those years, have stayed with an intimacy that their makers could never have anticipated. Something made for a broadcast schedule becomes part of a stranger’s sense of being alive. A performance survives in an archive, and somewhere another person presses play because a piece of their childhood is still audible inside it. I feel enormous gratitude for that preservation. To find an old work intact, still loved and still capable of making me laugh, can be unexpectedly moving. It is evidence that something which mattered to the child I was has been carried through the intervening years. For a little while, the distance between us becomes easier to bear.
This is what I mean by a museum. I recognise the impulse in the things I return to, in the attention I give to an old image or a familiar piece of music. I want to keep the evidence of what it felt like to be here before so much became complicated. A favourite work holds the circumstances of an encounter as well as the work itself. Within it is the person I was when I first found it, with his particular hopes and his incomplete understanding of what could happen. When I return, I am paying attention to him. There is affection in that, and a kind of responsibility. I have carried him into a future he could not imagine. Keeping the things he loved sometimes feels like a way of assuring him that I remember.
But preservation has a limit that makes the whole undertaking ache. The work can survive almost perfectly while the conditions of encountering it vanish. I can find a clearer recording than the one I knew as a child. I can learn who made it and understand how it was done. I can place it within a history. None of that gives me back the first encounter. The knowledge I have gained accompanies me into every return, including the knowledge of what happened afterwards. An old comedy can still make me happy, then make me grieve with almost the same breath. I know now how much time has passed. I know that the world continued beyond the edges of those scenes, and that everyone in it was ageing even while I watched.
There is a heaviness in learning that I find difficult to describe without sounding ungrateful for understanding. I value knowledge. I also feel what it has cost me to acquire some of it. Certain things, once understood, become part of every subsequent experience. Knowing that a person can disappear changes the feeling of being with them. Knowing how easily security can fail changes the feeling of being safe. The soul grows heavier with what it has had to accommodate, and the world can seem darker because I can now see things that were always there. Even happiness becomes more exposed. I can be inside a good moment and already feel the future in which I will miss it. Sometimes the adult mind begins grieving while the beloved thing is still in front of it.
That is where the feeling of diminishing returns comes from. There are days when it seems that I have spent decades accumulating experience while losing some of the capacity that once made experience feel limitless. I understand more, yet enter less easily into the simple fact of being alive. I can recognise beauty and still struggle to receive it without reservation. The comparison with childhood becomes unfair, but it remains emotionally persuasive: those few years held so much, and all these later years have to work so hard. I can feel the unfairness of that thought even as I think it. My adult life contains love I could never have known as a child. Those relationships matter too much to be dismissed by any account of decline. The sorrow persists alongside them.
Research into nostalgia offers a description I recognise: remembering the past can strengthen a person’s sense of connection across time, including their connection to a future self. In the work of Emily Hong, Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, the stories people make of their lives help explain that relationship. I recognise the effort to keep a life continuous. Returning to something I loved can remind me what I still care about and give me a reason to carry it further. The sadness of return can contain an intention. I remember how wonder felt, and I want to remain capable of doing something with that memory. The museum has been keeping more than evidence of a vanished happiness. It has also been keeping an account of what I would like to give.
Then there is my daughter. She is at the beginning of everything I have spent so long looking back towards. The world reaches her without the history it brings to me. She has discoveries ahead of her that I have forgotten were ever discoveries, and I find myself moved by the thought of how ordinary some of them will look from outside. A sound, a patch of light, something familiar happening again. I am standing beside a life whose first encounters are still taking place. Parenthood gives that fact an immediacy that no amount of thinking about time ever gave me. I can look at her and feel the childhood I have lost, then feel how much attention her present requires. She is here now, and being here with her is something I can still do.
The years she may never consciously remember already matter to me beyond measure. That thought changes the way I regard the missing beginnings of my own life. So much can be given before a person is able to keep an account of receiving it. I do not need her to remember each time she was comforted for the comforting to have been worthwhile. I want her to have the experience of being answered when she needs us, of finding affection in the ordinary course of a day. There is something deeply moving about caring for a period of her life that may eventually be inaccessible to her. We can be present for it anyway. We can love the person she is now without waiting for the person who will remember.
I begin to understand what can become of the sorrow. The energy in it is real: the shock of losing innocence, the longing for people and places, the effort of absorbing things I would once have been unable to imagine. All of that has taken something out of me. Some of it can also inform the way I care for her. I know how a dismissive word can stay with a person, so I can take more care with what I say. I know the longing to feel safe, so I can try to be dependable. When she finds something wonderful, I can give her the time to be interested. These are small actions compared with the size of the feeling behind them. They are actions I can take.
Her life must have room to become unfamiliar to me. I can already feel the temptation to offer her everything that sustained my own childhood, to place the beloved works in front of her and hope they open in the same way. I will enjoy sharing them. I also want to recognise whatever she finds for herself. She deserves the freedom to be captivated by something I barely understand, to develop an affection whose depth belongs to her. My memories can make me attentive to the importance of that experience. They cannot determine its contents. I want to remember how much my own discoveries mattered whenever she asks me to look at one of hers. Being invited into her wonder will be its own happiness.
I will not be able to keep the knowledge of suffering from reaching her. The thought hurts, especially when I look at how new she is. There will be questions I cannot answer in a way that makes the world fair, and experiences I cannot prevent by loving her enough. I hope that when reality begins to press more heavily, she finds us available to help her bear it. I want her to be able to bring her disappointment home without having to make it smaller for our comfort. Whatever years of enchantment she has, I want her to know that growing older does not end her entitlement to tenderness. I am still learning that myself. Perhaps learning it with her will help me become the father I want to be.
For so long, I have imagined the best part of my life as something behind me that required careful preservation. Now I am involved in making days that another person may one day remember with that same impossible tenderness. Their meaning will largely escape me while they happen. An ordinary day can become precious much later, after the people in it have changed and the room is no longer available. I cannot manufacture that meaning for her. I can pay attention to the life we are sharing. There is relief in having something so immediate to care about. The old works will remain, and I will still return to them, but there are also moments happening now that deserve the fullness of my presence.
It is about her light now. I feel the words as an affection and a responsibility, with room in them for the life I am still living too. I have loved too much, and been loved too well, to believe that my own light has finished. Fatherhood gives it somewhere new to fall. Those eight eternal years remain inside me, with all the longing they have gathered. I will probably spend the rest of my life finding traces of them. But I can also sit beside my daughter while she discovers something, and let the moment belong to her. One day she may reach back towards these years and find a feeling of being loved. I hope I will have helped make that feeling. For now, I get to be here while her world is opening.
Further reading: Patricia J. Bauer and Marina Larkina, “The onset of childhood amnesia in childhood” (Memory, 2014); Emily K. Hong, Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut, “How Does Nostalgia Conduce to Global Self-Continuity?” (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2022).