Theories of Child Development

January 31, 2019

unless

Kingdom Come

Three

My father was a reader. My father wanted the kingdom of heaven to come. He wanted it here on earth for everyone, and he believed in the possibility of it here on earth, and he wanted to understand how it could happen, and why it hadn’t happened, and why there was injustice and inequality and suffering, and what was to be done. And so he read.

He read big, bursting novels as a child, Dumas and Dickens and Balzac and Hugo, and then as a young man and for the rest of his life he read philosophers and poets and psychologists and economists and political scientists and environmentalists and anthropologists and, above all, sociologists. He read about suffering and happiness and sex and crime and education and music and war and the beginning of the world and the end of the world. He was in the middle of dozens of books when he died. Last week, on the day before we spread his ashes, I packed my father’s books into boxes, stripping out all his makeshift bookmarks, losing his place.

I found this marker within Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait. This relic from the long defunct Behavioral Science Book Club, is, as it happens, my cardboard twin, in that, judging from the date in the upper right corner, it probably came into my father’s possession within days of my birth, if not on the exact day.

We have some things in common, my cardboard twin and I, beyond both being a little over a half a century old. We both spent our life in the orbit of our father but obscured to him and him to us. With my cardboard twin and me there’s a persistent grasping, even as we begin to discolor with age, toward bringing the certainty of intellection to the unknowable mystery of the earliest years: my twin has the Theories of Childhood; I have all my cardboard markers, all these gods that came into my young hands in place of my father and long ago got stripped from whatever place they were holding. And with both of us there’s this sense of a debt, of a box forever unchecked, some part of life undone. Something is still to be delivered. Something is still to be received.

(continued)