Neil Levenson wasn't the only one to have a childhood sweetheart called Denise. My primary object of affection also went by this name and although I didn't write a doo-wop song in her honour, I've never forgotten the happy days we spent together, as here, feeding the deer at Bedford's Park in the summer of '69.
Some clever people with cold hearts sneer at sentimentality and dismiss early forms of love as puppyish. They fail to appreciate what Scott Fitzgerald described as the undesirous medley of joy and innocence that belongs to immature romance and think the experiences and emotions of childhood are best grown-out of and forgotten. Almost they seem embarrassed by such feelings and infatuations and reject nostalgia as indecent or in some way reactionary and escapist.
But Freud knew the crucial nature of first love and acknowledged the psychic importance of returning to the past. Our greatest poets also possess not only a distinct memory of childhood, but retain fidelity with its promise.
Those who believe that paradise can only be re-entered via an act of socio-sexual transgression might like to consider whether such doesn't begin with Lady Chatterley and her lover, for example, but with two anonymous six-year-olds holding hands under the desk, or unashamedly agreeing to show one another their genitalia behind the bushes ...
Some clever people with cold hearts sneer at sentimentality and dismiss early forms of love as puppyish. They fail to appreciate what Scott Fitzgerald described as the undesirous medley of joy and innocence that belongs to immature romance and think the experiences and emotions of childhood are best grown-out of and forgotten. Almost they seem embarrassed by such feelings and infatuations and reject nostalgia as indecent or in some way reactionary and escapist.
But Freud knew the crucial nature of first love and acknowledged the psychic importance of returning to the past. Our greatest poets also possess not only a distinct memory of childhood, but retain fidelity with its promise.
Those who believe that paradise can only be re-entered via an act of socio-sexual transgression might like to consider whether such doesn't begin with Lady Chatterley and her lover, for example, but with two anonymous six-year-olds holding hands under the desk, or unashamedly agreeing to show one another their genitalia behind the bushes ...
