Saturday, July 26, 2003
Daddy
Fatherhood seems to be the topic as of late that has taken every thought captive. I talk about it, dream about it, read about it, pray about it, and of course blog about it. The following is taken from Architect of Middle Earth, and is Tolkien’s son Michael.
“My earliest memories of him—I am his second son, and was born in Oxford in 1920—was of a unique adult, the only “grown-up” who appeared to take my childish comments and questions with complete seriousness. Whatever interested me seemed invariably to interest him more, even my earliest efforts to talk. Not many years ago he showed me a battered notebook in which he had carefully set down the words I applied to every object I saw. As a philologist he was fascinated by the fact that all words I used ended in –ng-: for example, lalang (light), gong (lampshade) papang (pipe), this last uttered as I removed his pipe from his mouth and inserted it in my own.
“His bedtime stories seemed exceptional. Unlike other people, he did not read them from a book, but simply told them, and they were infinitely more exciting and much funnier than anything read from the children’s books at the time. The quality of reality, of being inside a story and so being part of it, which has been, I believe, at least an important factor contributing to the world-wide success of his imaginative works, was already apparent to a small, though already critical and fairly imaginative boy.
“Inevitably, he was not a super-human father, and often he found his children insufferably irritating, self-opinionated, foolish and even occasionally totally incomprehensible. But he never lost his ability to talk to and not at or down to his children. In my own case he always made me feel that what I was doing and what I was thinking in my youth were of far more immediate importance than anything he was doing or thinking.”
Oh, to mold and shape my children with true love and Godliness!
Fatherhood seems to be the topic as of late that has taken every thought captive. I talk about it, dream about it, read about it, pray about it, and of course blog about it. The following is taken from Architect of Middle Earth, and is Tolkien’s son Michael.
“My earliest memories of him—I am his second son, and was born in Oxford in 1920—was of a unique adult, the only “grown-up” who appeared to take my childish comments and questions with complete seriousness. Whatever interested me seemed invariably to interest him more, even my earliest efforts to talk. Not many years ago he showed me a battered notebook in which he had carefully set down the words I applied to every object I saw. As a philologist he was fascinated by the fact that all words I used ended in –ng-: for example, lalang (light), gong (lampshade) papang (pipe), this last uttered as I removed his pipe from his mouth and inserted it in my own.
“His bedtime stories seemed exceptional. Unlike other people, he did not read them from a book, but simply told them, and they were infinitely more exciting and much funnier than anything read from the children’s books at the time. The quality of reality, of being inside a story and so being part of it, which has been, I believe, at least an important factor contributing to the world-wide success of his imaginative works, was already apparent to a small, though already critical and fairly imaginative boy.
“Inevitably, he was not a super-human father, and often he found his children insufferably irritating, self-opinionated, foolish and even occasionally totally incomprehensible. But he never lost his ability to talk to and not at or down to his children. In my own case he always made me feel that what I was doing and what I was thinking in my youth were of far more immediate importance than anything he was doing or thinking.”
Oh, to mold and shape my children with true love and Godliness!
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