“ Whatever you do—hang on to your childhood!
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Favorite slide in today’s Reading List:
13. “Whatever you do—hang on to your childhood!” Christopher Hitchen’s last Vanity Fair article is up. It’s on Charles Dickens and the importance of hanging on to your childhood. [VF]
It is all there to emphasize the one central and polar and critical point that Dickens wishes to enjoin on us all: whatever you do—hang on to your childhood! He was true to this in his fashion, both in ways that delight me and in ways that do not. He loved the idea of a birthday celebration, being lavish about it, reminding people that they were once unborn and are now launched. This is bighearted, and we might all do a bit more of it.
