safe children

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

On safe children, Al writes

>Hi all,
>
>More on the stuck-in-adolescence thread:
>
>I've been rereading bits and pieces of VL recently, and came across this bit
>on p216 that I glossed over the first time around.  It's where she's laying
>next to Brock in the motel room:
>
>"She understood as clearly as she could allow herself to what Brock wanted
>her to do, understood at last, dismally, that she might even do it-- not for
>him, unhappy fucker, but because she had lost just too much control, time
>was rushing all around her, these were rapids, and as far ahead as she could
>see it looked like Brock's stretch of the river, another stage, like sex,
>children, surgery, further into adulthood perilous and real, into the secret
>that life is soldiering, that soldiering includes death, that those
>soldiered for, not yet and often never in on the secret, are always, at
>every age, children."
>
>I'm not sure what to make of this: a sense and fear of impending adulthood?
>A glimmer of familial responsibility?  
>
>Al


>
Don't know if it's relevant, since I'm not really following this thread, but 
isn't Brock described somewhere as--the worst kind of adolescent, collegiate 
dickhead grown into adulthood--I don't have the exact quote, but the idea is 
great as well as a funny description.  These guys, the Brocks of the world, 
destroyers of children as Al's quote notes, are the real ones stuck in 
adolescence.  The bullying, twisted and already-defeated adolescent type who 
must hurt the weaker.

john m