"The mind of a child! Children have no hearts (cf. Peter Pan, another story Meg could reproduce fairly accurately), and their minds are rickety towers of surreal detritus."
— Zink, Nell (b. 1964)
Author
Work Title
Place of Publication
New York
Publisher
Harper Collins
Date
2015
Metaphor
"The mind of a child! Children have no hearts (cf. Peter Pan, another story Meg could reproduce fairly accurately), and their minds are rickety towers of surreal detritus."
Metaphor in Context
It disheartened Meg to think that Karen might regard her minimal roster of chores and homework as equivalent to the labors of Cinderella. In reality, it was much stranger than that. The mind of a child! Children have no hearts (cf. Peter Pan, another story Meg could reproduce fairly accurately), and their minds are rickety towers of surreal detritus. Of course Karen remembered Lee and Byrdie. Once there was a house, a boat; once there was a big, mean boy. There were men, wading pools in sunlight, termites, stamp hinges, and coffee-table books of illustrations by Maxfield Parrish. There was a push-button gear shift, high up on a dashboard. There were little white buttons on Lee's pink shirt where she lay in a haze of Pernod fumes while he slept it off. It was all there. But as memories. Not photographs. Not stories. There were no anecdotes, no mentions of "your brother." She had no way of connecting the dots.
(p. 74)
(p. 74)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Nell Zink, Mislaid (New York: Harper Collins, 2015).
Date of Entry
01/08/2016
