At a writer’s party last night, a discussion about parenting leapt a generation and an ocean. The dead spoke to the living. This is why I love literature.
We had all been asked to bring a favorite passage to read. In the high Boulder dusk after an eclectic potluck dinner, books came out and pages from Rushdie and Eisley and M. F. K. Fisher were read aloud by lamplight. Topics ran the gamut. Several touched on parenting, and two in particular collided nicely.
E. M. Forster wrote, in Where Angel’s Fear to Tread, that unconditional love ran from parent to child but could not reverse the course, from child to parent. A child loved but not unconditionally. The geology professor from Texas who read this passage said she didn’t know if she agreed with him, but it had set her thinking. She had sons. She wondered if she loved them more than they loved her . . .
Later, we heard a passage from Nicole Krauss’ Great House, in which a father says he ceased to be the center of the universe with the birth of his second son. Being a parent removed the veil of self-importance for good. He wasn’t a model parent, by any means. The birth of his first son triggered no such understanding. Parents fail to show up for duty. Many resent what’s asked of them.
E. M. Forster wrote, in Where Angel’s Fear to Tread, that unconditional love ran from parent to child but could not reverse the course, from child to parent. A child loved but not unconditionally. The geology professor from Texas who read this passage said she didn’t know if she agreed with him, but it had set her thinking. She had sons. She wondered if she loved them more than they loved her . . .
Later, we heard a passage from Nicole Krauss’ Great House, in which a father says he ceased to be the center of the universe with the birth of his second son. Being a parent removed the veil of self-importance for good. He wasn’t a model parent, by any means. The birth of his first son triggered no such understanding. Parents fail to show up for duty. Many resent what’s asked of them.
At night’s end, people remembered these two passages as contradictory. Wasn’t it interesting that Krauss and Forster disagreed? To me, they’d said the same thing: it is human to love the self until parenthood blasts you beyond self-interest. If children loved their parents unconditionally, they would never individuate. Parents feel devotion to protect and preserve; children feel devotion to the calling world. And so parental love is a repeating wave, a generational movement from self to selflessness. The decades of a life determine which part of the wave you are riding.
Krauss spoke to Forster. We rode the waves. Makes me want to roll up my sleeves and get bookish. Makes me love the Rouault lithograph that hangs in my stairway more than ever. Its title is “Have Mercy.”
Many thanks to Lisa Jones for collecting us all around her festive table last night.
And thanks to Dreamstime for the book/wave photo.
Krauss spoke to Forster. We rode the waves. Makes me want to roll up my sleeves and get bookish. Makes me love the Rouault lithograph that hangs in my stairway more than ever. Its title is “Have Mercy.”
Many thanks to Lisa Jones for collecting us all around her festive table last night.
And thanks to Dreamstime for the book/wave photo.
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