ABSTRACT
Theodor Adorno often writes about childhood experience as a sort of refuge from the alienated, deadening forms of experience that prevail in the world of late modernity. Adorno developed this elevated sense of childhood, as a kind of placeholder for utopian social possibility, in large part from his reading of Marcel Proust. Thus Adorno writes of his early experience of the twilight in the small village of Amorbach as taking away, in advance, the trauma of com-modified experience for the German emigré in the United States. Adorno came upon the phrase in Proust's early collection of short stories, Pleasures and Days. In Negative Dialectic, Adorno associates this idea of a unique happiness associated with childhood memory with the possibility of metaphysical experience. Adorno suggests that there is something vital for metaphysical experience in the child's sense that what he or she feels and experiences in a beloved place is unrepeatable and unique, to be found only in this particular place.
