The dust had settled on the country road. Poxig was ambling down the road and thinking of his boyhood on these streets. Mom had long since passed away. But the mere approach of these prerequisite to glory irked him somewhat. He could no longer return to the past. Why should he try to become a child again? What was the point?
There was something in the child Gabriel that he had lost. What was Sir Binural talking about? Wasn’t it that sense of wonder? When we become adults, we no longer have awe at the mysteries of life. We think that science and philosophy explain it all. Poxig actually no longer believed in childish things, but more than that, he didn’t believe that the adventure was an end in itself.
To remember what it was like to be a child, that was the difficulty in itself. To not trivialize the struggles of the child to accept his parents’ authority, that was truly difficult. And so Poxig returned to Excelsior with trepidation, he truly did not know what to think. But in time, he would be able to seize upon his goal: to become worthy of the title of “light warrior.”
He found his childhood home to be abandoned, and the area desolate and depopulated. He tried to imagine what it might have looked like in his memory, but could not recall those pleasant hours he spent as a boy going to and fro the nearby creek. There was nothing to recommend this place, whoever had once lived there was gone. He found out the difficult truth that it is all but impossible to return to your youth.
If anything could be gleaned from this, it was that the child’s wonder must become his own. He too must allow for the adventure of his circumstances to become greater than the irrecoverable past. He would wait on the King’s reply: therein, he would find the key to the ineffable Latin phrase ” Puer magnum est.”
Andrew J. Wolfram 