The future of parents, the past of children in the books of Augustine Sedgewick and Francesc Serés Literature - News Room USA

paternity A story of power and loveAugustine Sedgewick reconstructs the lives of some men who are not only famous, but practically archetypal. The peculiarity is that it only does so in its respective ones. It’s an exciting idea, given the names: Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Henry VIII, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and . There is empirical and exhaustive research of anecdotes and riches of relationships between people and facts that avoid the obvious. Besides, Sedgewick spares nothing. Nothing awkward, I mean, about the role these men played as parents.

The chapters on , Freud and Dylan will sound familiar because they have become truly universal names. That’s not to say that new things can’t be found there. Or at least things that weren’t that widely known. For example, I did not know – and if I did, I do not rule it out, I had forgotten because I am the father of very small children, I do not sleep and I forget everything – that not only the son but also the father of Aristotle was called Nicomachus. It thus takes on a different dimension: perhaps they were not just a philosopher’s notes addressed to the son, but a series of lessons transmitted intergenerationally, from one Nicomachus to another Nicomachus.

But it is also an essay that causes some perplexities. paternity A story of power and love could have revealed that fatherhood, patriarchy, and paternalism have gone hand in hand throughout history, but that they are actually different things and only contingently connected, which is a pedantic way of saying: there is hope. But it is suggested, between the lines, that fatherhood, patriarchy and paternalism are intrinsically linked. And, of course, in the conclusion, when Sedgewick asks veiledly why it is so difficult to find new models of fatherhood, he is rather pessimistic. How could it not be, if in the previous three hundred pages he has suggested that they are indestructible things?

The author comes to confess that the interest in writing this book arose from his own recent fatherhood. It is hinted, then, that when you ask what it is to be a father, there is a personal and even emotional interest. Curiously, however, he chooses a hyper-intellectualized way to respond to his concern: retracing what the founders of Western culture said and did about fatherhood from ancient Greece to the present day.

But perhaps there is another path, more fertile, if you have a personal interest in trying to understand what it is to be a father. There is no need to reconstruct more than two thousand years of intellectual history, it is enough to live intensely the three hundred and sixty-five days of an inaugural love. A The first anyexplains his first year of life as the father of Juli, born in Graz, Austria. Serés asks himself the transcendental questions that parenthood generates. Death, the future, human fragility or being a parent at an advanced age (when you are no longer, as an Italian waitress says, a bird of the first flight) are the questions that guide a chronicle that conjures up the bewilderment of the moment: nothing is more archaic than having children, nothing is more new than having children.

As this first year progresses, Serés traces a sentimental and moral map that goes from Saidí (his town) to Graz, where Juli’s mother is from, and back to Saidí. It is a journey sometimes made of memories and conversations and sometimes of kilometers by car or train. But each step on the journey leaves traces, because each step is made of the history of a person or a family.

Serés imagines future pasts while offering lucid brushstrokes of the history of central and eastern Europe, and notes that we don’t know what to do with the abundance of the past. This is a wonderful find fromThe first any: the past abundance. Maybe the past is too present. Or maybe it explains less than we’d like and much, much less than we’d need.

At one point, a friend of Saidí asks Serés some difficult questions. Having children now, in wartime? To be your child’s friend or just—but what a piece of “just”!—to be a father? Serés replies modestly: “I don’t have answers, I only have stories”. And it will be modesty or who knows what, but it seems to me that he doesn’t want to tell his friend that he actually does have answers: the stories are the answer. Especially when they are explained with the mastery, hope and wisdom ofThe first any.