There is always a moment when the place that shelters us no longer fits. The womb, once so safe and warm, eventually becomes a prison: not because it has changed shape, but because it can no longer contain the life that pulses and demands larger space. Nilton Bonder reminds us of this with precision: growth is, above all, a form of expulsion. We are always invited — or thrown — forward, like someone shedding a skin without asking permission.
Perhaps this is the secret logic of all maturing: escaping the nests that once seemed eternal. The cradle, that small wooden boat, gives way to the single bed; the single bed, to the double; and so we keep changing the furniture of life as if changing horizons. The tiny preschool chair once felt like a throne, but soon it was replaced by the university bench, which in turn became the office chair — and, if we’re lucky, the living-room armchair where old age loves to rest. All of these are metaphors of the same pedagogy: to grow is to change seats, to accept that the old dwelling, however dear, can no longer contain the body that insists on stretching itself.
And yet, there is something funny about this ritual. We spend half our lives believing that the next space is larger and better, when in fact it only changes its proportions, shifting our perspectives. It’s not that places shrink or expand: it’s our way of inhabiting them that shifts scale. What once felt immense becomes narrow, what was narrow reveals itself wide — and what seemed definitive turns out to be provisional.
Memory as an expanded space
When I was a child, there was a living room that seemed like a cathedral. It wasn’t built of stained glass, nor did it echo with solemn hymns, but to me it was immense: a territory big enough to hold cousins, toys, quarrels, videogames, and even the stifling summer nights. The floor, drawn like a secret mosaic, seemed to whisper to curious eyes, while the scent of the house played at translating colors into aromas, turning each step into a little mischief of the senses.
There, I discovered that childhood spaces are not measured in square meters but in intensity. The more laughter, sweat, and confusion, the larger the room became. The walls, obedient, would retreat before our inventions. The slippery back ramp, strictly off-limits, felt like our private rollercoaster, and the plain concrete slab — just a slab! — rose in my memory as the lookout of a metropolis. Children don’t see slabs: they see endless plateaus, trampolines to the sky, runways for the impossible.
Sloterdijk would say we lived inside an affective bubble. And the bubble of childhood, let’s be honest, is always larger than the actual space. It’s as if the house inflated itself just to hold our deliriums, our secret alliances, our cousin-pacts against the adult world. Today I think: maybe the room was never really big; it was us, small as we were, who made it immense, as if the shrunken body gave more breath to the size of the dream.
And there was an involuntary grace in this: the smaller the stature, the greater the grandeur of the place. Perhaps that is the most honest equation of childhood.
The return and the disenchantment
Two decades later, I went back to that same house. Not for a holiday season, but for the short span of a coffee. And there it was: the corner bakery stubbornly surviving; the neighboring houses, unchanged yet wrinkled; the street, once dusty, now tamed by asphalt. The neighborhood looked frozen in a faded photograph — time had passed, but lazily.
And then I entered. The room that had been my private Olympic stadium revealed itself… tiny. Almost like a model. I kept wondering: how did so many children fit in there? Where had all the shouts, races, falls, and secret pacts gone? The old floor still creaked, loyal to time, but the mosaic that once leapt at my eyes now hid itself, playing at becoming something else — as if the ground had gained secrets only memory could attempt to decipher. And the back ramp, ah, that childhood rollercoaster! Today it’s nothing more than a slanted piece of concrete, barely enough to intimidate a hurried ant.
Baudrillard would laugh at this: the real room does not match the simulacrum my memory had built. What I saw was not a shrunken space, but the collapse of an image. Childhood creates grand holograms; adulthood returns cracked walls and low ceilings. And it’s in this mismatch that we realize: the place was never as we remembered it — it was the memory that inflated it to glory.
It’s funny (or cruel?) to notice that, when it comes to scale, time has a sense of humor. Our eyes grow, our bodies lengthen, but the room shrinks. Perhaps that is life’s secret payback: it gives us inches, but steals meters.
A philosophy of time and space
Time has this perverse talent: it rearranges spaces like an impatient decorator. What once was vast now feels narrow; what seemed an abyss is only a step. Childhood sees dimensions with eyes of exaggeration, while maturity insists on restoring modest proportions. It’s as if life were a humorless architect, reducing our personal cathedrals to tiny concrete flats.
Freud might call this experience the uncanny (unheimlich): returning to a beloved childhood place is both comforting and disturbing. We recognize the forms, but they betray us; nostalgia comes, but with it a sudden unease, as if the scenery were out of place — or worse, as if we ourselves were out of place in it.
Winnicott, on the other hand, would remind us that childhood is a master at expanding space through play. A small room, crossed by games, laughter, and fantasies, can become an entire continent. The famous “transitional space” is not measured by walls but by inventions. Perhaps that’s why, when we return as adults, we find only the skeleton of what was once a universe: we no longer see the stage, only the platform.
And then Baudrillard whispers in our ear: we never return to the real space, we return to the simulacrum our memory invented. The “huge room” never existed as such; what existed was the intensity with which we inhabited it. And Sloterdijk would add with irony: we grow within affective spheres, and each sphere has its limit. When it bursts, the inflated grandeur vanishes, leaving only the deflated bubble — still visible, but incapable of containing us.
The true disconcerting fact is realizing it was never the room that shrank. We grew, and with that the places lost the aura we once lent them. Time doesn’t take away meters; it takes away myths.
Fear as a deformed space
If memory has the power to inflate small rooms until they look like palaces, fear does even more: it inflates hallways into labyrinths, shadows into monsters. Who hasn’t, in childhood, hesitated before a dark room, convinced that behind the door lay an army of ghosts? A light switch was all it took to reveal that the “army” was… a coat rack.
Freud already knew fear is less about the object itself than about the unknown we project onto it. Faced with uncertainty, the mind prefers to fabricate giants rather than admit emptiness. It’s easier to believe in the monster under the bed than to accept that beneath it there is nothing but dust.
Winnicott, with his delicacy, would remind us that play also has this side: it teaches us to deal with what frightens us, creating intermediate worlds where fear can be rehearsed. The teddy bear, the blanket fort, the hide-and-seek game — all of these are miniatures of terror, rehearsals so we can laugh at it later.
And then Adorno, ever acidic, chimes in: much of adult life is discovering that the taboos and fears that paralyzed us were not mountains but small hills. The supposed danger was only a poorly lit stage set. We discover the dark room is just a room, the noise on the roof was only the wind — and that many of the “great fears” were nothing but social or psychic constructions, inflated to keep us obedient.
Childhood expands spaces through enchantment. Fear expands them through terror. Both distort scale, both deceive us. The difference is that memory still manages to draw a smile from us; fear, when it dissolves, usually elicits a nervous laugh: “Was it just that?”
Existence, growth, and disenchantment
Growing up, deep down, is an exercise in disenchantment. Houses shrink, toys break, childhood heroes reveal clumsy seams. But alongside this loss of external grandeur, something silent happens: our inner spaces expand. We gain memory, thought, imagination — and we discover that the true infinite doesn’t fit in our aunt’s living room, but in the mind that insists on revisiting it.
Sloterdijk would say life is a succession of cocoons. Each stage is a protective bubble that, sooner or later, bursts. The crib, the living room, the school, the university, the office: all are temporary cocoons. And each time one bursts, we feel the discomfort of nakedness, until we find another sphere to inhabit. The paradox is that we never quite fit in the old ones again, but we also never fully inhabit the new. We are always in-between: neither here nor there.
Here lies the irony: disenchantment is not a failure, it is an invitation. When we realize the mountain was a hill, the room was small, the fear was shadow, we also discover the vastness of the awareness that allows us to laugh at it all. Adorno nudges us to remember that culture keeps inflating myths to tame us; but growing up, perhaps, is exactly learning to deflate them with a well-aimed critical needle.
And so we go: from room to room, from cocoon to cocoon, from myth to myth. Each time, less dazzled and more attentive. We discover that childhood gave us the grace to see the world larger than it was; adulthood gives us the grace to see that we became larger than the world.
Conclusion: laughing at time
And so we laugh. Not in a roaring way, but with that contained, almost conspiratorial chuckle that arises from the clash between expectation and reality. The childhood room shrank, the ramp became mere concrete, the fear deflated — and us? We grew, expanded, became enough space to understand that life plays with us in scale and perspective.
Perhaps the grace lies precisely here: if the room got smaller, if the fear was only shadow, if the hero turned out human, it doesn’t matter. We laugh because we understand the world was never really outside us; we were always growing within it, and it within us. Each space, each object, each memory is now a fragment of a personal cosmos, ready to be revisited without hurry, without needing to fit into old measurements.
And there is irony in this: the great experiences of childhood are still alive, but we no longer fit in them — or perhaps they never truly fit in us, they only seemed large enough to teach us how to laugh at the size of things. To grow is this: to realize that greatness is not in the room, nor the ramp, nor the fear; it is in our ability to cross them, to laugh at them, to carry within us the secret map of every place we’ve ever inhabited, even if they now look so small.
In the end, time doesn’t steal meters from us; it only teaches us to measure them with an adult eye, wise and slightly mischievous. And that, let’s admit, is the greatest room we could ever desire.
References
- Adorno, T. W. (2024). Minima Moralia: Reflexões a partir da vida danificada. São Paulo: Ática.
- Bonder, N. (1998). A alma imoral: traição e tradição através dos tempos. São Paulo: Rocco.
- Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacros e Simulação. São Paulo: Loyola.
- Freud, S. (2002). O estranho [Unheimlich]. In Edição standard das obras psicológicas completas de Sigmund Freud (Vol. XVII). Rio de Janeiro: Imago.
- Sloterdijk, P. (2000). Esferas I: Bolhas. São Paulo: WMF Martins Fontes.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. London: Tavistock Publications.
Leave a Reply