A Different Meaning of Heartless in Peter Pan

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, how’s it going?

Going well. Who’s this and where are you?

This is Father Constantine Lazarakis. I’m calling from Southampton, New York.

Well, welcome to the show. What can we do for you, Father Constantine?

Okay, cool. So this is kind of fun. I read to my kids for the second time, actually, Peter Pan. We finished it a couple of months ago. And when I got to the last paragraph, I read this sentence, and it kind of confused me. So I’ll tell you what the sentence is. It says, when Margaret grows up, Margaret, of course, is Wendy’s daughter. Now, Wendy’s an old lady now, right? It says, when Margaret grows up, she will have a daughter who is to be Peter’s mother in turn. And that’s what will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

And when I read the word heartless, I said, huh. Because we don’t think about kids as being heartless. And I thought, first I thought maybe heartless had a different meaning at turn of the century in the United Kingdom. I don’t know. You know, maybe it meant like lighthearted, or maybe it meant free. But then as I started to think about it, there’s this theme throughout the book of how cruel it was of Wendy and the boys to have left their parents, and how Mr. and Mrs. Darling suffered so much while they were gone, you know? So I said, maybe he does mean heartless, like we mean heartless when we say it now in 21st century America. And then I was talking to my wife and my kids and my father-in-law about it. We said, well, there is kind of a heartlessness in being free. Maybe it kind of means both, you know, because like when you are carefree, you’re kind of insensitive to the needs and the feelings of others, maybe. I don’t know. It’s really interesting. So I said, I got to call these guys and see what they have to say about it.

I would fully expect a man of the cloth to do a really great textual analysis like that, by the way. That’s funny. That’s outstanding. I think you’re 99% of the way there. The heartlessness is about the undeveloped nature of a child’s heart where they haven’t experienced the setbacks of true loss yet. So they don’t understand what they’re doing to other people when they do something like run away.

And so there is a tradition that’s now considered archaic or rare of using heartless to mean lacking understanding, where you’re not aware of your effects on other people or the aware of the effects of your own actions. So Barry is saying that the children don’t experience the same heartbreak and brokenheartedness of adults. They seem strong in the face of what adults would consider to be loss. The adults can’t really fathom that, that children are so—we call it resilience, don’t we?

Right.

But the old-fashioned word heartlessness really means it’s as if they don’t have a heart because they can’t be hurt as bad as adults can be hurt.

Well, it’s funny, too, because the other two things he says, right? He says innocent and gay, so, you know, innocent and happy. But I think there’s a connection, too, because they wouldn’t be so innocent and happy if they did have that level of empathy. They’re not really weighed down by understanding the difficulty of like, I don’t know, whatever, life or parenthood or the difficulty of caring for another.

Right.

That’s really interesting.

Yeah, that is a mark of growing older, right? The trade-off.

It is certainly the trade-off. And the whole experience of the book for me, and I haven’t read it in a long time, I think I was 11 or 12 when I read it. And kind of right there between those two things, true childhood and the incipient adulthood, and kind of getting that. Part of me said, how irresponsible, right? The adult part was already speaking up. But the child part was like, I want to do that. I want to be that.

I was talking to this friend of mine. I don’t watch this show, but apparently there’s some show on network television where Peter Pan is one of the characters. It’s like this mishmash of all these different fairy tale characters.

Yeah, once upon a time.

And I guess Peter Pan is a villain in it. And I said, well, he’s a villain in Barry’s novel, too. Like, if you really read it, he’s not a nice guy. He’s, like, totally self-centered, can’t remember anything Wendy says unless it’s about him, you know, ready to kill the wild boys if need be to get to hook. You know, he’s a ruthless little character. He probably did a bunch of panspleaning, too, right?

Yeah, right.

Well, there’s a reason they coined the term the Peter Pan complex.

Right.

Well, I guess so. Because there are people who have some or all of those traits. But it’s cool that all this discussion that you’ve had with your family comes out of this single old-fashioned word choice. And I think that you’ve really hit upon a thing that happens to us when we don’t only read the book of the moment, when we go back to some of these fundamental classics.

Yeah, really fun. Well, I deal with stuff like that all the time in the church, you know.

Yeah, some of your texts are a little older, I understand.

Yeah, a little bit older. We had this big debate when I was in high school about passions. Everybody’s like, oh, passions are great, you know, because you’re passionate about something. You want to pursue it. But the church fathers all say, you know, you’ve got to do battle with your passions. They’re afflictions. They’re not—so that’s another word, but I guess that’s for another day.

I love it. Father, thank you very much for your call. We really appreciate it.

Hey, you guys, God bless. Thanks for the call. It was really fun to be on the show. Love what you guys do. Thank you.

Call us again sometime.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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