Letters of fatherly advice

This collection of words of wisdom from Dads, via the lost art of a letter, is well worth a look. It's via the fantastic Brain Picker.

My favourites are F. Scott Fitzgerald to his 11-year-old daughter:

Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about Cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship
Worry about…

 Things not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

 Things to think about:

What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

…And this from Ronald Reagan to his 26-year-old son on the eve of his wedding, which - as the website notes - is thoughtful and strikingly honest, but perhaps suggests Reagan senior had his concerns about his son straying!

Dear Mike:
Enclosed is the item I mentioned (with which goes a torn up IOU). I could stop here but I won’t.
You’ve heard all the jokes that have been rousted around by all the “unhappy marrieds” and cynics. Now, in case no one has suggested it, there is another viewpoint. You have entered into the most meaningful relationship there is in all human life. It can be whatever you decide to make it.
Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was till three A.M., a wife does know, and with that knowing, some of the magic of this relationship disappears. There are more men griping about marriage who kicked the whole thing away themselves than there can ever be wives deserving of blame. There is an old law of physics that you can only get out of a thing as much as you put in it. The man who puts into the marriage only half of what he owns will get that out. Sure, there will be moments when you will see someone or think back to an earlier time and you will be challenged to see if you can still make the grade, but let me tell you how really great is the challenge of proving your masculinity and charm with one woman for the rest of your life. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating, and it doesn’t take all that much manhood. It does take quite a man to remain attractive and to be loved by a woman who has heard him snore, seen him unshaven, tended him while he was sick and washed his dirty underwear. Do that and keep her still feeling a warm glow and you will know some very beautiful music. If you truly love a girl, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.
Mike, you know better than many what an unhappy home is and what it can do to others. Now you have a chance to make it come out the way it should. There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.
Love,
Dad
P.S. You’ll never get in trouble if you say “I love you” at least once a day.

Famous Dad #2 and #3

Today's 'famous Dads' illustrate failings at the most basic levels of fatherhood.

Rule no. 1: Don't sacrifice your children.

In the story of Abraham and Isaac from the Bible, the founding father of the Israelites was commanded by God to offer his son up as a sacrifice in the land of Moriah. He travelled for three days until he came to the mount that God told him of. Abraham gets Isaac to carry the wood upon which he would be sacrificed (well, you would, wouldn't you?), and when Isaac gets a bit suspicious and asks where the animal is that they're going to chuck on the fire, his father replies "God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering". The just as Abraham is about to actually sacrifice his son, "the angel of the Lord" appears and goes "woah woah woah, you weren't really going to do it were you?! We were just having you on!". The angel points to a ram "caught in a thicket by his horns", at which point I imagine Abraham is feeling pretty daft and definitely not Dad of the year.

Still, for his obedience Abraham received a promise of numerous descendants and abundant prosperity. I just wonder whether, years later when Abraham and Isaac were sharing a pint in a cosy tavern, Abraham said: 'Isaac, you remember that day we went to the mount and sacrificed the goat? Well, you'll never guess what…'

Of course, the story of Abraham has featured in a few songs, including Leonard Cohen's 'Story of Isaac', which may well have been inspired by Wilfred Owen's 'The parable of the old man and the young' as it seems to speak to the cruelty and futility of war. Here we hear the story from 9-year-old Isaac's perspective, with the suggestion that maybe he was a bit more clued in to what was going on than the Bible version makes out. There's also Bob Dylan's 'Highway 61 revisited', where Abraham switches from an incredulous "Man, you must be puttin' me on" to a Tarantino-esque "Where do you want this killin' done?" rather too quickly for my liking. 

Rule no. 2: Don't devour your own offspring.

According to Roman myth (inspired by the original Greek myth), it had been foretold that one of the sons of the titan Saturn would overthrow him, just as he had overthrown his father, Caelus. Not one to take any chances, Saturn ate his children moments after each was born. After being caught out by this five times, his wife Ops eventually hid his sixth son, Jupiter, on the island of Crete, deceiving Saturn by offering a stone wrapped in swaddling in his place (I suppose he'd never had the chance to learn the difference in feel between a baby and a stone). Jupiter eventually supplanted his father just as the prophecy had predicted.

The Spanish artist Goya depicted Saturn devouring his son in a famous painting.

Wikipedia says: 'Various interpretations of the meaning of the picture have been offered: the conflict between youth and old age, time as the devourer of all things, the wrath of God and an allegory of the situation in Spain, where the fatherland consumed its own children in wars and revolution. There have been explanations rooted in Goya's relationships with his own son, Xavier, the only of his six children to survive to adulthood, or with his live-in housekeeper and possible mistress, Leocadia Weiss; the sex of the body being consumed can not be determined with certainty.'

I used this painting on the cover of The Psychologist following our 2008 redesign. It didn't go down too well.

Dad songs #5 and #6

It's a Billy Bragg special today, following requests from fellow psychologists Mike Eslea and Mike Page.

First we have 'Brickbat' from the 'William Bloke' album, when Bragg was coming to terms with his domesticity and life as a father.

"I used to want to plant bombs at the Last Night of the Proms / But now you'll find me with the baby, in the bathroom / With that big shell listening for the sound of the sea / The baby and me..."

Then it's 'Tank park salute' from 'Don't try this at home'. In this 2003 interview he describes it as the most honest thing he's written. When he sings 'You were so tall: how could you fall?' I defy you not to get a shiver down your spine and a tear in your eye.

Billy Bragg: I wrote that about my father who died in 1976. It was strange because I had never really spoken about that to anybody at the time he died really up until I wrote that song. When I wrote that song, playing it live, people would come up to me and tell me about an experience they had with…not necessarily a family member, just someone dear to them who was lost. So I had to suddenly find a way of speaking about it. Now even to the extent of speak about it on TV, which I had never had done before.

Andrew Denton: What was it you wrote that expressed you?

Billy Bragg: Well, really, I suppose about my relationship with my father and how I felt about the sense of loss. I suppose that's obvious to anybody. But there's some things in there about, you know, about being tall and him being strong and all those dad things that dads are. I've had big burly guys who have just loaded all the gear into the truck come to me afterwards and say, "That song about your dad, I thought it was great." You can't really ask for more than that.

Andrew Denton: Part of the thing with your father dying — as you were saying, he was a big strong man — but when your father dies he's suddenly made small.

Billy Bragg: He is. He's made mortal. When I became a father myself, it gave me a completely different perspective. Really great as well, because just recently last month was the 50th anniversary of my parents getting married. I was walking along the beach that day and I was speaking to my mum and I thought to myself, "What would be the thing of all the things I've achieved that I would most proud to show to my dad?" 

And it occurred to me it'd be my son, Jack, that was the thing I'm most proud of. When I thought about it that, it further occurred to me that the thing he was probably most proud of was me and my brother. And that made me feel closer to him on that day, that special day.

The $2 million letter from father to son

“Dear Michael, Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery.” 

So begins a 1953 letter from Francis Crick to his 12-year-old son. It's to be auctioned in April with an estimated price of $1-2 million. It contains the first written description of DNA as a code and of the mechanism of DNA replication – preceding the pivotal scientific articles about DNA’s structure and its genetic implications by more than a month.

The full transcript of the letter is pretty detailed… I can only assume that Nick Jnr didn't exist in those days, so Crick wasn't competing with a repeat of Pokemon or Phineas and Ferb. 

I like 'Read this carefully so you can understand it. When we come home we will show you the model'. I wish I did the kind of job where I could write a letter like that to my boys, rather than 'Today I shifted some apostrophes around. When I come home I would like to talk about something else.'

I would be interested to hear from other Dads how much interest their children show in their work, and whether they even know what it is they do. Just yesterday my eldest informed me that there was a rumour at school that I am a Doctor, but that he had told everyone that I'm not a useful one.

Famous Dad #1

'To my dearest daughter,

Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know?'

Richard Dawkins has the answers in this rather lovely letter to his 10-year-old daughter Juliet.

The letter includes his thoughts on love and evidence, which of course includes parental love:

'There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.'