It is easier for them to commune with steeples, radio masts, birds and airplanes than with the foreshortened humans at street level. … Around them is the constant susurration of human voices, the bewilderment on human faces, fragments of trouble, pain and delight half grasped, understood with a superior knowledge but never with a human knowledge. They long for this knowledge, as children long to exchange their own mental world for the brutal insights of adulthood.

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 355