That quotation-reblog-thing reminded me that I wanted to post this; it’s a metaphor that has stuck with me.

“Man’s primitive condition is not isolation or solitary existence but life in society. Our existence opens with the closest of unions, since, even before we draw our first breath, we share our mother’s existence: then, when we open our eyes to the light, we find ourselves at the breast of a human being: her love cradles us, keeps a check upon us and binds us to herself by a thousand ties. Society is our natural state. Which is why, as we come to self-awareness, the union that had at first been so intimate grows increasingly looser and the disintegration of primitive society becomes more and more manifest. If the mother wants to have again, all to herself, the child that but lately was nestling beneath her heart, she has to fetch him from the street and wrest him from the company of his playmates. For the child prefers the company of his peers over the society which he did not enter of his own volition, but into which he merely happened to have been born.”