Omni College Plus Up to October 2019

himself---that she has lusts and weaknesses much as he does. Even hatred of another
involves a certain idealization of them: we see the object of our hatred as a villain who
knows exactly what he is doing, when in truth he is a weak person who is acting out of
fear and confusion. And our hatred of people is often borne of betrayal, this being why
former friends are often the objects of the most
If we saw people as they are, instead of seeing them through the lens of our
idealizations, we would neither love nor hate them; and so long as we do have
emotional attachments to them, we do not see them for what they are. More generally,
so long as we relate to the world in an emotion- as opposed to reason-based manner,
we understand it in terms of fairy tales and therefore do not see it as it is. As we age,
the fairy tales in question change form: the five-year-old boy believes that he is
Superman, whereas his 35-year-old counterpart believes that he will be the next Bill
Gates, but neither is any less deluded than the other.
These principles are not specific to any culture or era. They hold universally.
They are hold neither more nor less of the United States today than they did of Sumer
or Sparta---or, indeed, than they did of Russian in the late 19 th century, this being the
setting of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, which, like Hahn’s In Childhood, is about
parting with infantile illusions. The difference is that Ivan Ilych is about the
rationalizations that adults use to cloak their continued acceptance of fairy tales,
whereas Hahn’s poem is much less concerned with those rationalizations than with the
child’s naïve and uncritical acceptance of those fairy tales themselves.