Extrapolation

When you consider an adult whom you've known from infancy, you're tempted to think that their traits at maturity were evident from birth. You saw it in them. Shyness or assertiveness or enterprise or doggedness or volubility or curiosity -- all there right at the starting gate. "It stands to reason that she would have entered the field of medicine -- she was always so compassionate." I'm never convinced when people say such things. I think that it's easy to make retrospective claims. If a child is interested in fifty things, we look back and only remember the ones that "foretold" -- so to speak -- her mature interests. We forget about the traits that didn't develop or which metamorphosized. 

As simple as it is to claim that the mature being is a predictable exfoliation of childhood traits, just so difficult is it to make actual predictions. In my experience it's almost impossible to look at a two-year-old or a five-year-old or even a sixteen-year-old and extrapolate to the adult. In fact, it's far easier to misjudge a child than to get him or her right. No matter how well you might think you know them, children are hard to read.  

These thoughts are prompted by reading Nicholas Murray's skillful new Life of Matthew Arnold. The poet's father, the famous education reformer 'Arnold of Rugby,' a man who should have known better, was absolutely wrong about his son. According to Thomas Arnold, Matt was 'not likely to form intimate friendships;" "He flitters about from flower to flower but is not apt to fix."  "I do not see how the sources of deep thought are to be reached in him." " He  does not know what it is to work because he knows so little what to think."  The best he can say: "I think he is not so idle as he was." 

Idle! and shallow!  Has there ever a been a more colossal misjudgment of a son by a father? Or did Matthew Arnold live the most of his life with a giant "I'll show him" chip on his shoulder?

Come to think of it, I'm rather glad that I don't know what judgments or predictions my father or other adults might have made about me.