A young boy of around 9 finds a candle, a candlestick,
a ruler, and a book of matches.
He places the candle in the candlestick on a desk in front of him. He uses the ruler to ensure that his eyes
will be exactly 16cm from the flame.
Then he strikes a match and lights the candle. After that he just stares. He stares long and hard into the flame,
focussing on a black spot at the very centre.
A young girl of around 13 climbs the stairs
of her two-storey house. When she
reaches the second floor she stands in front of the banister which separates
the second floor from a long fall to the ground. She lifts one leg carefully over the banister,
then the other. Balancing gracefully on
the other side, she closes her eyes to focus her mind. She lifts her arms like a swimmer on an
Olympic pool’s diving-board, and jumps.
What is going on in these two scenes? The boy in the first one is me. When I was a child, I read a story by the
writer Roald Dahl in which a man trains himself to concentrate on a single
object for so long that he is able to access the hidden powers possessed by his
sub-conscious mind. In “The
Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” the hero stares hard into a candle flame
placed exactly 16cm from his face for hour after hour, day after day, month
after month, until his magnificent mental powers begin to appear. The fictional method seemed quite logical and
plausible to my young mind. And
so I was trying to make the method work for real.
I heard about the girl from a friend this
week. Perhaps influenced by children’s
fiction in which characters can fly if only they believe hard enough, the young
girl jumped from the second floor of her house in the belief that she would be
able to fly in real life.
And the results?
After spending a day or two in a darkened
room, I got frustrated with the time it was taking for my superior mental
powers to appear. A child next door to
me had come to believe, after watching “Back to the Future,” that he could
time-travel if only he could make his bicycle go faster than 88 miles per
hour. I knew that this wasn’t true, but
riding our bikes round and round the neighbourhood was more fun than the
candle, so I wandered off and helped him with his experiment instead.
The girl’s experiment had a less happy
ending. She realised that she was unable
to fly when she fell to the ground and badly injured herself. She had to spend two months in hospital
before making a full recovery.
I can see two lessons in these stories of
childish innocence. The first is that
without an adult’s many experiences of being lied to, cheated and exploited, a
romantic and dreamy child can be quite impressionable. Perhaps we ought to be a little more careful
about what children watch and read, especially when they can find just about
anything if they have internet access.
The second lesson is this: If you think you can fly, try taking off from
ground level first.
Vocabulary:
a book of matches – matches which are not
kept in a box, but a small folded card
to stare – to look long and hard
two-storey – having two floors or levels
a banister – the railing at the side of a staircase
sub-conscious – of one’s mind, below the
level at which you are aware
plausible – believable; possibly true
to be exploited – to be unfairly treated or
used; to be taken advantage of
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