One recent morning after breakfast, I straightened a couch cushion in the living room only to feel something sticky underneath. It was an orange bear-shaped vitamin, fully intact and only minimally fuzzy. My daughter excitedly reclaimed it and ate it. She had apparently placed it under the cushion for safekeeping, then immediately forgot as she went off to play.
But not everything is retrieved so promptly. Over the years, upon periodic checking, we have found under the couch cushions lost library books, play cards, pens, pencils, small toys, a toothbrush, orange peels, a number of small coins (American and European, diverse denominations), hair pins, lone socks, the occasional dead bug, baby teeth (some loose, others in a plastic baggie), a flat mixing spatula (the one that proclaims “I love you with every beet of my heart!”), and a whole roll of scotch tape. Treasures, all of them, brought back to face the light of day.
The visible world is not all that there is, theologians and philosophers have insisted for millennia. “All things are full of gods,” proclaimed Thales of Miletus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher born in the late seventh century BC. For his ability to defend the reality of things invisible, Thales became known as one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Isn’t it wisdom to admit your limits and humbly recognize that if you don’t see something, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist? All Things Are Full of Gods, echoed modern theologian David Bentley Hart just last year in his book-length manifesto for seeing the immaterial world as no less (and rather quite more) real than the material. (We do not have an official roster of the seven sages of America, but some people I know would submit Hart’s name to it.)
This is all fine and good—it is perhaps not so shocking or controversial to join the overwhelming majority of the human race across space and time in admitting that there are some very real things in this world that we simply cannot see. But what do we make of the world beneath the couch cushions? If you look for it, you will find it, see it, touch the fuzzy vitamins stowed underneath. But who will go looking, unless you are on an aggressive cleaning spree or can’t find a library book anywhere in the house that is now overdue and accruing fines? This world might as well be invisible by function, at least most of the time. Does it even matter what’s hiding under there—and to whom might it matter? As adults, we have had decades of conditioning in the American dream to love things that are big, full-sized, not so easy to hide—and certainly not under the couch cushions. But for children, the story is different. Small is beautiful—and even more important, it is practical. The things one can clutch in one tiny hand acquire a special significance to a child.
By contrast, most small things seem to adults as insignificant as things invisible. We don’t see tiny Legos until we step on one, barefoot, in the morning dark, and feel the pain—only then this is real. The loss of small objects largely does not bother us, unless it poses an inconvenience—as when children might misplace or hide away their parents’ keys. And yet, for children, the ones who are small themselves and see the small things all around as proportionately greater than these things appear to adults, the world beneath the couch cushions is an integral part of the world of childhood. Hiding objects there is a game, but it is also a dream, a manifesto, a proclamation of the sort of beautiful world that the authors of the best children’s literature like to envision. It is a full-hearted admission that this world is enchanted to its core, no matter how ordinary it may look to the naked eye.
We all knew this world once, but then we grew up; we forgot. To be an adult, after all, implies certain universally acceptable behaviors, societal conditioning we’ve internalized and embraced. Adulting behavior code includes a lot of things, some debatable and others less so. But we can all agree that stowing your vitamins under the couch cushions for an hour while you go play is not normal adult behavior. Parents, however, get to be anthropologists at this remarkable civilizational outpost. If only they pay attention, they get to experience the magical world of childhood all over again as an integral part of child-rearing and, of course, basic housekeeping.
What does it mean to look at the world through the eyes of a child? It means to see the table under which one can still walk without bowing one’s head as a tunnel, a doorway between worlds, an extraordinary castle inside an ordinary house. It means to see that tiny hole dug up with a toy shovel in the yard as a quest for the discovery of dinosaurs on this very property. It means to see the nightly bath as a vast ocean, albeit one quite safe from any danger, and oneself as a mermaid traversing the deep on an adventure that will conclude safely in a fluffy-toweled hug, warm pajamas, and a bedtime book. And it means to see the world hidden within the couch as a kingdom entire—a kingdom worth longing for, whole somehow, miraculously untarnished by the brokenness that adults know too well. It is not only gummy bear vitamins, after all, that get lost in it—yet find a new life in the child’s imagination. The fuzzies that attach themselves to said vitamins and anything else within the couch interior get redeemed in this mysterious world as well, transformed into a mist that must naturally accompany the attendant magic.
A story accompanies every object hidden carefully away, placed by tiny hands just so, never haphazardly, even if sometimes forgotten after. The cushions keep their secrets well—doing what they must by covering the stowaway treasures, simply by existing in the place for which they had been made, measured to perfect dimensions in the factory. Such is the nature of the orderly world adults love so much: all things have their place and purpose. Over time, a child learns this too—this is a necessary part of learning to exist in the world of grown-ups and their rules and expectations even while delighting in the smaller world that remains hidden away, except during play.
But this is a fragile world. Couches wear out over the years—their lifespan shortened by the aggressive bouncing upon their visible surface by the same keepers of the tiny kingdom within their frames. Undoubtedly, these keepers who hide away treasures prove poor stewards, as they then proceed to use the external, visible surface of the couch for a trampoline.
And then there are the inexorable ravages of time, which works its iron will upon persons and things both. Like the visible world in which adults so consciously reside, this hidden world of childhood will not last forever. But while here, it is beautiful in its own surprising way to those who know it—creators and observers alike. Isn’t this enough?
Image Credit: Florence Truelson, “Velvet Lounge” (1937) from the National Gallery of Art.
