Sensation and Sensibility

I've been wanting to post this eloquent passage from Mary McCarthy on how sensation and sensibility can become detached from (and then reconverge with) one another:

Sensation and sensibility are at their height in the child; its thin, tender membrane of perception is constantly being stabbed by objects, words, and events that it does not understand. In lieu of understanding the child ‘notices.’ Think of [. . .] the beginning of Dr. Zhivago, where the child Yury, taken to his mother’s funeral, looks out the window at the cabbages, wrinkled and blue with cold, in the winter fields. Yury, being a child, cannot comprehend the important event that has happened to him (death), but his eye takes in the shivering cabbages. Everyone experiences something like this in moments of intense grief or public solemnity, such as funerals; feelings, distracted from their real causes, attach themselves arbitrarily to sights, smells and sounds. But a child passes a good part of his life in this attentive state of detachment.

-- Mary McCarthy, “Characters in Fiction,” Partisan Review 28:2 (March-April 1961), 176-7.