c2w?:
1)
c2w? wrote:And it really didn't strike me as kind of an odd way to accommodate a child's natural need for something of an attention-and-time-occupying nature, either, at the time. That was just business as usual in my world. As I understood the general set-up, it was just the natural order of things for me often to be asked to clear some random intellectual hurdle for no very apparent reason, and it was then my job to do so. And that was just that. Besides which, in this particular case, I actually was interested by the question. Because, you know, it's interesting.
If it's any consolation, yours sounds exactly like the household I wished I'd grown up in, as I suffered what I thought were the indignities of life in a peasant-village-offshoot that had established itself as an immigrant cell in Queens, and not a single editor among my relatives. My mother warned often about the risk that reading too much would cause me headaches, although paradoxically any test grade below a 90 was cause for an interrogation allowed to end only after a quart of tears were shed. Both father and she upheld the teaching that a lack of school education had held them back, though they did well as highly dedicated workers. The path to success and money for their offspring lay therefore in academic success and post-graduate degrees of any kind - which they seemed to think came only in flavors like Doctor, Lawyer, Big Professor, Business Executive and First Greek President. (Need I tell you ours was a Dukakis household?) Of course, they also conveyed the confidence that there would be no obstacles on any path to such as me, long as I stoppped collecting funny books and avoided harm from strangers in the Jungle That Is New York, and of course I visualized myself regularly as the subject of celebratory headlines, which I can hardly fault to them alone. Further irony was I had a sense, picked up somehow by osmosis from the Anglo culture, that a classical education begins with Latin, but they declared it dead and made me take French, the language of diplomacy, which resulted in aforementioned cases of test grades below 90 and, in the end, je tout l'oublie. Auto-didacticism otherwise was encouraged and all books without pictures in them were assumed to be Good for School, which is how I got away with all that science fiction. I did read about Zeno's paradox somewhere, since I remember a competition with my brother to take steps always only halfway to the bedroom door and never get there, which always led to one of us tottering on tippy-toe at the threshold, at which point the other solved the paradox with a rough push from behind. Now you'll hate me, because one thing I did try later, when my own son was whining while I did kitchen work, was to employ Socratic questioning (from a position standing at the sink) to instill in his mind some puzzler about The Universe in the hope it would occupy him for a time, which occasionally gained his interest but never reduced the whining. I'm sure Zeno's Paradox was among these. I also considered trying to rigorously avoid allowing him to learn the earth was round and revolved around the sun, but to give him the tools of logic and scientific inquiry and guide him by way of open questions to his own personal Copernican Revolution, after which the world would belong to him. He'll no doubt give thanks one day this plan never got beyond a vague conceptual stage, given its prima facie infeasability in a city environment where we did everything to enable peer contact and did not altogether ban television.
2) Are you sure you're not Salinger, his daughter, protege, spiritual successor or such?
3)
It was not all fun and games, believe me. I just wasn't as smart as I was supposed to be. Which was kind of conducive to a repressed but extreme state of dread, anxiety, and brutal self-abnegation most if not all of the time.
However, since that actually turns out to be exactly the attitude that can really help a young woman persevere with her self-destructive and drug-addicted chosen way of life, it was all good in the end, really. Plus, they meant well, as I said. So no resentments, no regrets
I believe you. No one's as smart as they are supposed to be, let alone me. Which is kind of conducive to a repressed but extreme state of dread, anxiety, and neurotic self-exposure (of the wordy, not indecent kind) most if not all of the time. However, since that actually turns out to be another attitude that can really help a young man persevere with his self-destructive and drug-addicted chosen way of life, it was all good in the end, really. (Except nothing ever ends.)
4) (Said to MacC)
I envy you.
From our respective distances, I'm sure the feeling is mutual - triangularly, quadratically, pentahexaseptagonically and so forth. I especially envy your being smarter than me. Which has the further and involuntary consequence, in association with anyone identifying themselves as a female of roughly my age group, of making me fall hopelessly in electronically mediated love. At least for the time one is online. Please do forgive this weakness. Because I can't in good conscience sign this missive as either, Mr. Darcy or Young Brando, much as I would like. Maybe your Little Brother in the Glass Family.
