Preface To Innocence: The Loss Of Innocence

If you were an English major in college like I was you heard the phrase "loss of innocence" more times than any other, or perhaps just less than "man's inhumanity to man" (although at the time, I was more obsessed with "woman's inhumanity to man").  It's common in most novels for a main character to undergo a disappointment or a betrayal & "lose their innocence," meaning their naivety.  Sometimes, in racier books, stories, or poems, the loss of innocence was an actual rape, in which a female character's virginity is "taken."  Using an online searchable Bible I found zero mentions of the word "innocence" in the King James Version, although I found nine mentions in the New International Version.  All those mentions refer to the opposite of "guilt," though the site linked to a small passage from gospel.com which was titled, "Innocence In The Bible: A Christian Perspective."  It said, simply, "[The Christian] god cherishes, protects, & rewards those who keep blameless in his eyes - those who obey & trust in him."  It does suggest to me that if lose your innocence - like, for example, if you are raped - there's a case to be made using the logic of this statement that you have not kept blameless in that god's eyes, because you weren't obeying & trusting him.  That would have made a spirited conversation in an English class!  I myself was trying to think if there were a time when I felt my innocence was lost, & I thought of two moments in my life, one general, one specific.  The general one involved what I think was the onset of puberty, around sixth & seventh grade (at the time, it seemed to happen overnight, but in retrospect, it was a process that took several months).  In addition to becoming sexually attracted to girls (a terrifying enough prospect) (you'd think one of my older brothers might have warned me about unwanted erections), I recall that I started to make more sense of the world at that time.  I noticed things around me, paid more attention to the news, thought about things in the "bigger picture."  There were so many things I had just never thought about that were in my mind all of a sudden.  That was a certain loss of innocence - as if innocence were a certain ignorance, which contributed to the bliss of childhood.  The second time involved my mother, who, as I've doubtless said, is vain & narcissistic.  We were poor & despite what some kids might have been saying to me behind my back (or to my face) at school, I wasn't entirely aware of how close to the poverty line we were living.  One day, in that way she had of asking her children questions about herself, my mother asked me, "You're not ashamed of how poor we are, are you?"  I always think I should have responded, "Well, I am NOW," but I saw how she needed reassuring, so I went ahead & responded in the negative.  It occurs to me, telling the story now, that the specific incident could very well have happened in the middle of my biological loss of innocence.  In both cases - & in the literary study of "innocence" - once that innocence is lost, it's not coming back.  For good or ill.