When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.

The speaker links spiritual presence—“the eternal present” and “the smile of God”—with the act of recollection, suggesting that access to transcendence is not only a mystical attainment but also a recovery of primal perception. Childhood functions as a reservoir of unmediated experience: wonder, intensity, and the capacity to see meaning before it is dulled by habit or social conditioning. The “most significant discoveries” are framed not as new information but as rediscoveries—truths about self and world that were once intuitively grasped. The line thus aligns with Hesse’s recurring theme that inner renewal often requires a return: to origins, to innocence, and to the deep memory where the sacred can be felt again.