Author Topic: Fathers and sons  (Read 955 times)

hubag bohol

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Fathers and sons
« on: September 16, 2012, 07:53:32 PM »
Ted Hughes on the Universal Inner Child
By Maria Popova


“The analogy between the artist and the child is that both live in a world of their own making,” wrote Anaïs Nin in her diary in 1945. Four decades later, 23 years after Sylvia Plath took her own life at the age of 30, Ted Hughes (1930-1998) wrote to their 24-year-old son, Nicholas. The letter, found in Letters of Ted Hughes, is superb in its entirety and a worthy addition to history’s finest fatherly advice, but this particular passage speaking to the beautiful vulnerability of our inner child and its longing to be seen, heard, let loose is an absolutely exquisite articulation of the human condition — don’t let the length and density deter you from absorbing it, for once you do, it’ll saturate every cell of your soul.

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hubag bohol

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Re: Fathers and sons
« Reply #1 on: September 16, 2012, 07:55:02 PM »
When I came to Lake Victoria, it was quite obvious to me that in some of the most important ways you are much more mature than I am. . . . But in many other ways obviously you are still childish — how could you not be, you alone among mankind? It’s something people don’t discuss, because it’s something most people are aware of only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances. And when we meet people this is what we usually meet. And if this is the only part of them we meet we’re likely to get a rough time, and to end up making ‘no contact’. But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It’s an intangible thing. But they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child. Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced. Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth having, or it’s worth having only as a tool — for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful. So there it is. And the sense of itself, in that little being, at its core, is what it always was. But since that artificial secondary self took over the control of life around the age of eight, and relegated the real, vulnerable, supersensitive, suffering self back into its nursery, it has lacked training, this inner prisoner. And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line — unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears. And yet that’s the moment it wants. That’s where it comes alive — even if only to be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt. And that’s where it calls up its own resources — not artificial aids, picked up outside, but real inner resources, real biological ability to cope, and to turn to account, and to enjoy. That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

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hubag bohol

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Re: Fathers and sons
« Reply #2 on: September 16, 2012, 07:55:45 PM »
In 2009, 47-year-old Nicholas hanged himself in his home in Alaska. His sister, Frieda, told the press upon news of his death: “Despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence and enthusiasm for the next project or plan.”

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Re: Fathers and sons
« Reply #3 on: September 16, 2012, 08:09:35 PM »
SEPTEMBER, 2012
How to Raise a Child: 10 Rules from Susan Sontag
By: Maria Popova

Be consistent. Always speak well of his pop. Do not discourage childish fantasies.

The second volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980, gave us the celebrated author and thinker’s insights on love, writing, censorship, and aphorisms. However, it was in the first installment, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 (public library), that the beloved public intellectual coalesces out of a shaky young woman grappling with her place in relation to the world and herself — as we’ve already seen in her 1957 list of “rules + duties for being 24″.

Two years later, in September of 1959, Sontag lists her 10 rules for raising a child. (Their object, Sontag’s son David Rieff, edited this very volume.) Underpinning them is a subtle but palpable reverence for the precious gift of “childishness” — something Ted Hughes has spoken to with such stirring eloquence.

       1. Be consistent.
       2. Don’t speak about him to others (e.g., tell funny things) in his presence. (Don’t make him self-conscious.)
       3. Don’t praise him for something I wouldn’t always accept as good.
       4. Don’t reprimand him harshly for something he’s been allowed to do.
       5. Daily routine: eating, homework, bath, teeth, room, story, bed.
       6. Don’t allow him to monopolize me when I am with other people.
       7. Always speak well of his pop. (No faces, sighs, impatience, etc.)
       8. Do not discourage childish fantasies.
       9. Make him aware that there is a grown-up world that’s none of his business.
      10. Don’t assume that what I don’t like to do (bath, hairwash) he won’t like either.



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Re: Fathers and sons
« Reply #4 on: September 16, 2012, 09:10:27 PM »
Polonius's Advice to His Son

There ... my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character.  Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
T'hose friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg’d comrade.  Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel but, being in,
Bear't that th' opposed may beware of thee.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgement.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man;
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.

Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell; my blessing season this in thee!

-William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3

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Re: Fathers and sons
« Reply #5 on: September 16, 2012, 09:17:44 PM »
Father & Son

FATHER
 
It's not time to make a change,
Just relax, take it easy.
You're still young, that's your fault,
There's so much you have to know.
Find a girl, settle down,
If you want you can marry.
Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy.

I was once like you are now, and I know that it's not easy,
To be calm when you've found something going on.
But take your time, think a lot,
Why, think of everything you've got.
For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not.

SON

How can I try to explain, when I do he turns away again.
It's always been the same, same old story.
From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen.
[- From :http://www.elyrics.net/read/c/cat-stevens-lyrics/father-&-son-lyrics.html -]
Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away.
I know I have to go.

Father

It's not time to make a change,
Just sit down, take it slowly.
You're still young, that's your fault,
There's so much you have to go through.
Find a girl, settle down,
if you want you can marry.
Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy.

Son

All the times that I cried, keeping all the things I knew inside,
It's hard, but it's harder to ignore it.
If they were right, I'd agree, but it's them you know not me.
Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away.
I know I have to go.

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