The first delusion is permanence. Born into context without the context of understanding the transitory nature of said context, the infant arrives with the expectations of instinct, the desire for basic needs, for food, protection, attention, love. Beyond these--demands met, sleepy, uncertain of the line between the dreamtime and this wakeful state--fresh eyes in passive wonder begin to take in the world. It is always slowly opening, slowly glowing with the brightening of the infant's eyes. The color of the wall, the sound of the clock across the room, the regularity with which the one he will come to call "mother" appears and disappears: this stasis, this predictability is comforting.
Then, rapidly evolving--the new born, the infant, the toddler, the child---shocks parents and family, with the speed of his progressions. In charge of the chronometer, his beating heart, this amphibian soul adapts to the land, to the house, to the garden. Other architecture takes form, makes meaning out of the associations he has with it: his great grandmother's room (smelling of lysol and roses and pee) in his grandfather's house (white with blue trim) on the street where his cousins play and are always playing. "Dead End," is the warning. They stop their bikes just short of the rocky ditch, ravine, coulee. There are words now.
The boy picks the words that will make his own language. Out of the vocabulary of this host planet, this wet desert affixed to heaven, this spinning gear a in cryptic clock. Time teaches English, in these cities. English knows the names of things--of stars, and trees, of bodies of water, of the bodies that surround him and (gently) muffle him beneath the weight of "family". Unnerving, this acceleration is relative to generations, to proximity, to the investment of time (or lack of).
The familiar (today) will (forty years from now) be false memory conjured out of the still fresh and aching impossibility of permanence.
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