The Filter of Innocence
February 25, 2016 § Leave a comment
On the occasion of the death last week of Italian author Umberto Eco, the New York Review of Books shared his 1985 essay on two institutions of American childhood, Krazy Kat and Peanuts.
They affect us because we realize that if they are monsters it is because we, the adults, have made them so. In them we find everything: Freud, mass culture, digest culture, frustrated struggle for success, craving for affection, loneliness, passive acquiescence, and neurotic protest. But all these elements do not blossom directly, as we know them, from the mouths of a group of children: they are conceived and spoken after passing through the filter of innocence.
Neil Serven 
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