Innocence is much more powerful than experience...

I had time today to go looking for this passage from a late-2001 profile of Bono, which I'd vaguely remembered and associated with HTDAAB's recurrent themes of innocence and rebirth. To me these remarks throw a lot of light on the source of some of HTDAAB's images.

[Bono] "I saw this photograph recently. Anton Corbijn had an exhibition in Holland, and he made me go into this room full of Bonos -- a horrifying thought. And I noticed a shot of me at 21, and the look in the eye was so much clearer. Part of me must have thought our critics were right, and that beautiful naivete -- that I now see in my own children's faces -- I went about killing off. I thought it was something that you had to get rid of, and it's not true. Innocence is much more powerful than experience, especially when it has that teenage fearlessness beside it. That's really something."
--Isn't that just rampaging adolescent ego? The kind that makes a grown rock star want to save the world?
"You'd think so, but it's not. Not long after that picture was taken, when we were 23, all of a sudden America was going off for us, and the UK. You'd think that your ego should inflate, but an odd thing happens -- it implodes. I can remember times of being paralysed by fear where once I had faith -- in myself, in God, people around me. It was gone. At some point along the way I lost my nerve, and replaced it with front. I think I'm getting back to a more courageous place now."
--So if you could go and meet the youth in the photo, what would you tell him?
"That he was right. That's what I'd tell him."