Childhood – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, reflections on childhood, from my own personal experience.

One of my favorite types of daydreams is to imagine my current self talking to my younger self. It could be me as a junior in high school or me watching off to the side as my three- and four-year-old self began to conceive of the world around me. I can remember what my younger self was thinking in any given time so the “script” if you want to call it that is one of the easiest ones to write. And in the past, as is still the case today, I often wonder about my future self, who I’ll become as I continue in my life, who I’ll meet, where I’ll live, who I will be in my future. 

A couple of weeks ago I found myself thinking about all this for a good three hours while I was flying east from Kansas City to Newark on my return trip to Binghamton from a wonderful Easter weekend at home. As I watched the prairies of the Midwest give way to the deep cloud covered Appalachians, I kept thinking about who I dreamed I would become when I was at varying stages of my life. Would my six-year-old self whose life changed dramatically when he moved with his parents from Chicago to Kansas City be proud of how my 29-year-old self has found a way into a career where he still looks back at what he loved to think about as a kid? Would my moody teenage self be happy knowing that he was still going to be single at the end of the following decade? And what about my more recent past? Would the Seán who lived in London for a year and learned so much about the world in those months abroad, would he be proud or scared at how tough the next seven years of his life were going to be?

I wonder, and maybe this is a conversation better posed to psychologists, are we still the same people who we were as kids? Or do we transform or change the shape of our personality through our lived experiences, through our joys and sorrows? I remember thinking about myself more simplistically as a child, a time when the things that I was proud to be a part of conjured up images like the Space Shuttle or other marvels of the modern world. As I learned more about myself, I found more and more things that were new to me that I could attach myself to, that I could find some connection to. My interest in Ancient Rome was born out of a conversation with my Mom when I first remember hearing my Church called Roman Catholic. I knew where Rome was (I memorized the globe at a very early age) so the idea that I was a part of something so rooted to something so ancient was thrilling. 

Similar things happened at a time that I can’t pin down when I began to understand and listen to the stories about my Irish ancestors. It’s funny, I remember only one person from that generation, my grandfather’s Aunt Catherine who died in 2000 when I was seven. I remember her accent puzzling me, but I bet if I sat with her today, I’d be able to understand her perfectly well now that I’ve got nearly 30 years of listening to people from Mayo under my belt. On my Mom’s side I have only one memory of my great-grandmother, my GG as I always called her. I must have been very young, but I remember waking up from a nap in what’s now the computer room in my grandmother’s house in Kansas City and going out into the living room where she was sitting with my grandmother. All I remember her saying was “Hi, Seán.” When I told my Mom about this memory recently she said she must have carried me out because my GG died before I could walk, meaning this could well be one of my very first memories.

Still, when I think back to all those moments as if looking down the long string of a double bass, I wonder if the guy whose eyes saw those moments, whose ears heard those sounds, whose nose smelled those smells (for good or bad) was the same guy who I am today? If I can say anything definitive, it’s that the one constant among all those memories isn’t necessarily how they were framed or what I was thinking or feeling in each moment. It’s that the same internal monologue was going in the same voice that I still think in today. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the first time I recognized my conscious thoughts, something that a lot of people said was a profound idea. I asked if that for me was the moment best described as “In the beginning” for me, with everything else I ever have come to know or will come to know happening afterwards in the order that I discovered those things? Today I want to add onto that dogpile of a question and ask, which part of my past is most influencing my present, and by extension my future? I think the best way to look at answering this question is through the lens of nostalgia.

The truth is I’m not sure which reflections of my past that live on in my memory is the one that I’m most nostalgic for. There are echoes of all of those shadows in my life and my work today, the deep passion for natural history and the natural world in general that drove my six-year-old self whose favorite places in the world included the Field Museum and the Brookfield Zoo, or the teenage reflection who loved his Latin classes more than any other and really wanted to be doing better at it but just didn’t have the patience to stop overthinking things. I think those teenage loves drove me into my adulthood, after all as much as I loved spending my time in London’s Natural History Museum it was the British Museum that I dreamed working at when I decided to do either a Classics or a History PhD in 2016. It took me a few years to get into a program, by which time I’d settled not on Ancient Rome but on the Renaissance, before building my own field from the ground up, as a kid with my childhood would tend to do, to become a Historian of Renaissance Natural History.

As it happens, this whole idea of a hyper-individualized vision of a historical timeline, beginning with a person’s first consciousness about something could be useful in my work. After all, one of the great debates in the history of how the Americas were approached by Europeans during the Renaissance is whether it’s right to say they “encountered” or “discovered” these continents. I usually prefer to say “encountered” seeing as there were already generations of people reaching back into the Ice Age who had called these continents home. Still, if we think about this question less in the scope of all of human experience and more in the limited view of how one set of humans, one branch of the family isolated from others by circumstance understood the Americas when they reached those shores in 1492 then the word “discover” coming from the Latin “discooperiō” meaning “to expose” or “to lay bare” then the word does fit the experience of the many peoples of Europe in first learning of the existence another series of worlds across the Ocean Sea that they came to call America. But our history is the history of the creation of our modern world, a global world defined by shrinking borders and a growing sense that we’re all in this together, and for that world this isolated story of one perspective “discovering” the fact that other people had already made it to first base merely makes the discoverer a shortsighted pitcher. Without all the caveats and framing, the idea doesn’t work. It speaks to the warning that it’s best not to think of whole groups of people in the same context that we’d use to think of just one guy.

So, with that out of the way, do I think my younger self would be proud of who I am today? In some ways, yes, after all I’m sticking to doing something that I love despite a great deal of the odds and the circumstances of our world in 2022 seeming to be stacked against me making a living out of being a Historian of Renaissance Natural History. I may not be working at the Field Museum or at one of the other wonderful natural history museums in this country or beyond, but I’d say that’s still a possibility. Nonetheless, I imagine that teenage Seán would be a bit more forlorn knowing he’d still be single all these years later. Teenage moodiness can cast a shadow even from the confined distance of your memories. I think the moral here, if there is one, is that there’s always room for improvement, right? And at the end of the day, as my undergrad self the triple major in History, Philosophy, and Theology with double minors in French and Music would like to say, “Anything is possible.” So, if I could go for three and a half years without a lunch break trying to earn 3 majors and 2 minors in 4 years then I can get a job doing something I love and maybe figure out the personal life while I’m at it too.