La dolce vita

There is a lapse of time, I would say between 3 and 5-6 years old, when children are PERFECT, most of them.

It’s after they start to become little persons, with their own personality, and before they start to become little sheep, zoon politikon…They are just like real mystical angels, no other word than PERFECT. It’s just a brief moment in time, a blessed period, when, if their are yours, you melt down and could do practically everything for them: burn on the stake, kill everybody or even…kill them. Weird ideas, eh?

Well, not entirely mine…That’s the connexion between Fellini’s movie and this photo of a small girl (not mine, but mine was as cute as this one…) eating breakfast…

In the movie, which is weird in more than one way (just as life is…) one of the secundary characters, prof. Steiner, a fiftish intelectual, father of two lovely, supremely beautiful and cute children (a girl of about 5-6 and a boy of 3-4, I think) kills both of his children and then kills himself, making a mess out of Marcello, the journalist, who kind of loses it at the end of the movie…let’s himself drown in booze and debauchery…

I was myself puzzled by Steiner’s monstruous gesture. A long, long time I didn’t, couldn’t, get it…

In the film the tentative explanation was something about Steiner’s obssession with nuclear anihilation, with his fear that his children could endure the ultimate humiliation of nuclear Armageddon (only the battle isn’t to be between good and evil but between evil and worst…) but this explanation did not convinced me… seemed too abstract, in a way, even if the fifties were kind of on the edge in that respect…(I don’t understand why we don’t fear it anymore, the situation seems to me even more confuse and confusing, but, hey! that’s another thing…)

Finally, I had this revelation like explanation…crazy, of course, but much more likely…

Steiner killed his children, loving them more than anything in the world, because he couldn’t stand to see them degrading from that STATE OF PERFECTION! Because from 6-7 years old it’s down and down again until the end… Beauty, ingenuity, truthfulness, soul, everything goes to hell from them on. Adolescence? my Goodness! I don’t need to justify my explanation more than that. Everybody knows, as Leonard Cohen, put it so eloquently, there is a crack in everything…Neither youth, nor maturity, not to mention old age, could be even a far fetched match for that childish PERFECTION.

Just for the record; what Steiner did WAS monstruous AND insane, not a shred of doubt about it! I do not condone it and even less recommand it! But I feel kind of relieved I could find a possible (just possible) explanation for that monstruous deed…

So, enjoy the photos and accept that the children grow up and become foolish old man, like me…