“Some peculiarly intelligent children have discovered or invented ways to preserve to their access and experience the consciousness and character of the unique intelligences of each age of their life, becoming, as it were, a kind of Noah’s Ark of ‘ages of the self’ in a world where everyone is supposed to be something that is actually stupid and impossible: a single age.

These children, and some few adults who have acquired similar methods, discover ways to perpetuate these aspects of themselves, sometimes in the peculiar ‘inner worlds’ that we call paracosms.

We could take a hint from this: something is wrong with our ideas about growth and development, and part of what’s wrong is that an extrinsic and unnatural ‘standard’ which is cruel and useful only as an instrument of compulsion and torture demands that we ‘act our age’.

Well, we are no specific age. We cannot be an age. An age is an abstraction. The whole idea is interesting as a convenience but deadly as a definition. The number of your years is an interesting quantity, but it is not your age.”

— an anonymous informant