…Balthus’s adolescents, in an endless afternoon of reading, playing cards, and daydreaming, seem to have come, we are told, as a subject for inexhaustible meditation from Wuthering Heights, a dismal and hysterical novel that he reads in his own way.

What caught Balthus’s imagination in it was the manner in which children create a subsidiary world, an emotional island which they have the talent to robinsoner, to fill all the contours of. This subworld has its own time, its own weather, its own customs and morals. The only clock I can find in Balthus is on the mantel of The Golden Days in the Hirshhorn, and its dial is out of the picture.

Balthus’s children have no past (childhood resorbs a memory that cannot yet be consulted) and no future (as a concern). They are outside time.

From #8 in Guy Davenport’s A Balthus Notebook