Quotability

So Cleo's now 3 and a half, and change - or, to put it more exactly, she's at the perfect conjunction of willfulness and quotability. She's interested in questions of direction and control - why does she have to go to school? why does she have to wear a coat? - and she commands an impressive but not quite infallible range of linguistic principles. The result, as I'll try to show you, is something like the utterances of a North Korean dictator. Or, perhaps more surprisingly, the dynamics of Mozart's distraught family.

I'm thinking, for instance, of a moment on Christmas Day, when Cleo was trying to throw a Frisbee with her older cousin Jack. Jack can really hurl the disc, and was a bit disheartened to see that Cleo can only fling it about four feet - and with no sense of direction. But he played gamely, retrieving the rolling Frisbee while Cleo boldly announced that she is in fact really good at Frisbee, and that she can throw it a hundred feet.

"That wasn't a hundred," said Jack, as he walked to pick up her latest effort. "That was about six feet."
"Okay," announced Cleo, undeterred. "I will throw it one more time."
And then Jack, with a calm sarcasm: "Is one like code for a billion?"

Six, a hundred, a billion. When you rule the world in your mind, the distinctions between such values dwindles. Remember in 1994, when the North Korean press reported that Kim Jong Il had made 11 holes in one in a single round, in the process of shooting a remarkable 38-under-par 34. And this was the first time he had ever picked up a golf club. When you're truly remarkable, nothing is really remarkable.

Except, perhaps, your parents' (or your Western rivals') bizarre continued conceit that in fact they are the ones in charge. Which, in turn, you must challenge. Or, as Cleo put it the other day, at 5:30 a.m., "If you don't let me watch my video, I won't let you sleep." Hmm. We ignored her, but it turned out she had a point: it is difficult to sleep when a tiny person is screaming, two rooms over. On the other hand, it's also difficult to get the DVD player working when you're only 3. I considered our sleep-in, then, a gesture towards mutual affirmation.

At more reasonable hours, however, I'm more than happy to set up her video. And, in fact, I did so just yesterday evening - but forgot, in the process, to actually start the video, getting to the menu before tramping off to the kitchen to stir up some dinner. "How silly!" remarked Cleo, as L. entered the living room. "I mean, really."

That combination of acquired airy pretense and sincere frustration, coming from Cleo's mouth, was new to me, and I laughed. But in fact it was rather familiar, from other contexts. As Mayard Solomon shows, in his biography of Mozart, the composer faced real resistance from his father when he announced that he planned to tour Italy in 1778. Rather disingenuously, Leopold assigned his worries to Mozart's older sister, claiming that she had cried for two full days upon hearing the news. Mozart was, initially, resolute, and wrote back: "Tell her she must not cry over every sill trifle, or I shall never go home again!" But Leopold persisted, and suggested that Nannerl was worried that, should Mozart perish while abroad, she might be sold into service. "So your sister was not crying over a silly trifle," he concluded in a further letter, "when she wept over your letter."

Emotional blackmail! Battles for control, and the deployment of passive aggressiveness! Claims of silliness! Through our 3-year-old we live, I'm learning, the lives of more famous and accomplished men and women. Even if I still can't quite shoot that round of 34.