On reading "The Snow Leopard and some thoughts on fatherhood
I am reading "The Snow Leopard" by Peter Matthiessen, a highly acclaimed, award-winning travel book and I'm having a very hard time with it because the author's wife died the year before this trip and Matthiessen left behind his 8-year-old motherless boy to go on this adventure.
From early in the book: "Later I dreamed about my beautiful eight-year-old boy, whose mother died of cancer just last year. In the dream, I paid a visit to a dark cagelike shelter, where he was being kept with other children...."
Sounds like a tormented nightmare of a man who knew what he did was terrible, if you ask me.
When I was a girl, my mother died of cancer and I cannot imagine what it would be like if my father had left myself and my sisters for nearly a year right after that. It would have been very bad for all three of us. But this is what men can do, abandon their motherless children for the sake of their own personal quest and ambition.
In the introduction to the book, Pico Iyer writes: "The author, setting out, feels constantly the presence of some 'inner garden' to which he's lost the key; by the time he comes down, something has been put to rest – or clarified, if only for a moment – and the author has, perhaps, something to bring back to his boy that probably he could never have shared with him if he'd stayed home, more conventionally 'good.'"
I don't know Matthiesson's son at all - maybe the gifts his father gave him from abandoning him for seven months just after his mother died were totally worth it. But from my own personal experience, that my dad stuck around, changed his career focus to make sure he'd be home for dinner every night, showed up to our swim meets, those choices of his were his gifts to me as well, not just "more conventionally 'good.'" No one should ever underestimate the impact of a father on his children, or pretend that his chosen absence after a huge loss is somehow done to bring gifts to the abandoned child.
From early in the book: "Later I dreamed about my beautiful eight-year-old boy, whose mother died of cancer just last year. In the dream, I paid a visit to a dark cagelike shelter, where he was being kept with other children...."
Sounds like a tormented nightmare of a man who knew what he did was terrible, if you ask me.
When I was a girl, my mother died of cancer and I cannot imagine what it would be like if my father had left myself and my sisters for nearly a year right after that. It would have been very bad for all three of us. But this is what men can do, abandon their motherless children for the sake of their own personal quest and ambition.
In the introduction to the book, Pico Iyer writes: "The author, setting out, feels constantly the presence of some 'inner garden' to which he's lost the key; by the time he comes down, something has been put to rest – or clarified, if only for a moment – and the author has, perhaps, something to bring back to his boy that probably he could never have shared with him if he'd stayed home, more conventionally 'good.'"
I don't know Matthiesson's son at all - maybe the gifts his father gave him from abandoning him for seven months just after his mother died were totally worth it. But from my own personal experience, that my dad stuck around, changed his career focus to make sure he'd be home for dinner every night, showed up to our swim meets, those choices of his were his gifts to me as well, not just "more conventionally 'good.'" No one should ever underestimate the impact of a father on his children, or pretend that his chosen absence after a huge loss is somehow done to bring gifts to the abandoned child.
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