Enfance was born to remember us the faculty of “bringing visions into focus with our eyes shut”, as we did in a remote time, still fruitful and alive, when thinking in terms of images was more spontaneous.
It was a “possible pedagogy of the imagination that would accustom us to control our own inner vision without suffocating it or letting it fall (…) into confused, ephemeral daydreams, but would enable the images to crystallize into a well-defined, memorable, and self-sufficient form, the icastic form.”

(Excerpts from Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium: Visibility, 1985–1986).