we fear no god but each other

flinch. I believe my father saw this in me and did what he could to drown out whatever primordial voice had told me to fold up my personhood into something small and negligible.

The father washes onto the son. He lives inside you as an aspiration, a disappointment, or a fear.

A child’s relationship to his parents is in some way like our relationship to this God. So if I suffer, let me believe I have committed some offense, even though I don’t understand what it is. It is too terrifying to imagine that my parents do not know what they are doing. I will disown what I see, repress what I feel—and take the guilt upon myself

To this day, my greatest fear in life is to never be able to truly understand his identity as a man—to fully grasp how much he sacrificed, how much he cared, how hard he tried—and how much we may share as adults. That I, perhaps, will understand we were both just two men who, at their core, were trying nothing more than to grasp the hard truth that

This is my observation of people: Women go on saying deep in the unconscious, “Look, Mom, I am suffering as much as you suffered.” Boys go on saying to themselves later on, “Dad, don’t be worried, my life is as miserable as yours. I have not gone beyond you, I have not betrayed you. I remain the same miserable person as you were. I carry the chain,

How little we seem to be able to control after all, I thought. We expend our life energy trying to get our children to become what we think they should be, and they turn into something else altogether. We work and work, weekends and evenings, but still feel unappreciated or undone by our own unconscious compulsions. In the words of the Indian mysti

In a way, though, their absence felt appropriate, in keeping with my father’s otherworldly nature. It made a kind of poetic sense that a man so incapable of acting like a parent would somehow lack any of his own.

look at what the man was actually experiencing, you see someone feeling utterly frustrated, feeling like a total fool and a failure as a father and as a man, feeling powerless and helpless and weak, and desperately seeking a way out of his predicament. And you see someone not able to admit any of this, to himself or to his children. Underneath our