Picture Painting

In her chapter on ‘Picture Painting’, Charlotte encourages mothers to help their children make mental photographs.  “Get the children to look at a patch of landscape, and then to shut their eyes and call up the picture before them, if any bit of it is blurred, they had better look again.  When they have a perfect image before their eyes, let them say what they see.”

I have a gazillion albums of my own childhood – so distinct are the pictures, that if I shut my eyes, I can visit those places again.  I can still see the clover, practically feel the grass beneath my bare feet and taste the hard, juiceless raw guavas plucked and eaten only for the pleasure of finding a wild food source.

My sister and her husband gifted us their car when they returned to the US and what a marvelous provision it has been!  How wonderful to just pack the children in and ride off to   Lodhi Gardens, (undoubtedly one of Delhi’s most beautiful places.) We decided to do just that, choose a different spot and put this chapter into practice.

It was indeed as Charlotte said it would be.  There was that measure of strain on the attention.  Not a careless looking and glancing but an effort to be exercised – once in a while, not too often as it can be fatiguing”…the habit of getting a bit of landscape by heart.”

In seeing fully and in detail, Charlotte says the children (and the mother, may I add) are enabled, to carry vast and immeasurably beautiful art galleries within.  Not only do these contribute beautiful childhood memories, but also provide solace and refreshment.  I love how  Charlotte puts it – “the busiest of us have holidays when we slip our necks out of the yoke and come face to face with nature, to be healed and blessed…”  How soothing, when we are taxed and tired; to remember these places and times and be revived again.

I was quite surprised by Brandon’s poetic rendition of a tree in the course of his description.  “It looks like a man that had been shot.  The branches are spread but it is not dead, I can tell by the green leaves.”  I immediately kept in mind Charlotte’s caution and refrained from the “Ooh!”  The “Aah!” or other exclaims of wonder.   Instead, I smiled and gave him the just reward of a clear and concentrated listening.

“The mother,” writes she, “must beware how she spoils the simplicity, the objective character of the child’s enjoyment, by treating his little descriptions as feats of cleverness to be repeated to his father or visitors; she had better make a vow to suppress herself, ‘to say nothing to nobody’ in his presence at any rate, though the child should show himself a born poet.”

Caution heeded.  Thank you, Charlotte!