David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

But I remember once, during an afternoon on which he’d paid me to help him with some light yard work, asking my father why he never seemed to dispense direct advice about life the way my friends’ fathers did. At the time, his failure to give advice seemed to me to be evidence that he was either unusually taciturn and repressed, or else that he just didn’t care enough. In hindsight, I now realize that the reason was not the former and never the second, but rather that my father was, in his own particular way, somewhat wise, at least about certain things. In this instance, he was wise enough to be suspicious of his own desire to seem wise, and to refuse to indulge it — this could make him seem aloof and uncaring, but what he really was was disciplined. He was an adult; he had himself firmly in hand. This remains largely theory, but my best guess as to his never dispensing wisdom like other dads is that my father understood that advice — even wise advice — actually does nothing for the advisee, changes nothing inside, and can actually cause confusion when the advisee is made to feel the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of his own situation and path. I’m not putting this very well. If you begin to get the idea that other people can actually live by the clear, simple principles of good advice, it can make you feel even worse about your own inabilities. It can cause self-pity, which I think my father recognized as the great enemy of life and contributor to nihilism. Although it’s not as though he and I talked about it in any depth — that would have been too much like advice. I can’t remember how he specifically answered that day’s question. I remember asking it, including where we stood and how the rake felt in my hands as I asked it, but then there’s a blank after that. My best guess, derived from my knowledge of our dynamics, would be that he would say trying to advise me about what to do or not do would be like the childhood fable’s rabbit ‘begging’ not to be thrown in the briar patch. Whose name escapes me, though. But obviously meaning he felt it would have the reverse effect. He might have even laughed in a dry way, as though the question was comical in its lack of awareness of our dynamics and the obvious answer. It would probably be the same if I had asked him if he believed I didn’t respect him or his advice. He might act as if he was amused that I was so unaware of myself, that I was incapable of respect but didn’t even know it. It is, as mentioned, possible that he simply didn’t like me very much, and that he used a dry, sophisticated wittiness to sort of try to deal with that fact within himself. It would, I imagine, be hard on someone not to be able to like your own offspring. There would obviously be some guilt involved. I know that even the slumped, boneless way I sat when watching TV or listening to music peeved him — not directly, but it was another thing I used to overhear him speaking about in arguments with my mother. For what it’s worth, I accept the basic idea that parents instinctively do ‘love’ their offspring no matter what — the evolutionary reasoning behind this premise is too obvious to ignore. But actually ‘liking’ them, or enjoying them as people, seems like a totally different thing. It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children’s need to feel that their father or some other parent loves them. It also seems valid to consider the child’s desire to feel that a parent actually likes them, as love itself is so automatic and preprogrammed in a parent that it isn’t a very good test of whatever it is that the typical child feels so anxious to pass the test of. It’s not unlike the religious confidence that one is ‘loved unconditionally’ by God — as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn’t seem to really have anything to do with you, so it’s hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God. The point here is not that every last feeling and emotion must be taken personally as about you, but only that, for basic psychological reasons, it’s difficult not to feel this way when it comes to one’s father — it’s simply human nature.

Anyhow, all this is part of the question of how I came to be posted here in Examinations — the unexpected coincidences, changes in priorities and direction. Obviously, these sorts of unexpected things can happen in all sorts of different ways, and it’s dangerous to make too much of them. I remember having one roommate — this was at Lindenhurst College — who was a self-professed Christian. I actually had two roommates in the Lindenhurst dorm suite, with a shared communal ‘social room’ in the center and three small single bedrooms leading off of it, which was an excellent rooming setup — but one of these roommates in particular was a Christian, as was his girlfriend. Lindenhurst, which was the first college I attended, was a peculiar place in that it was primarily a school full of Chicagoland-area hippies and wastoids, but also had a fervent Christian minority who were totally separate from the overall life of the school. Christian in this case meaning evangelical, just like Jimmy Carter’s sister, who, if I remember it correctly, was reported as going around performing freelance exorcisms. The fact that members of this evangelical branch of Protestantism refer to themselves as just ‘Christians,’ as though there were only one real kind, is usually enough to characterize them, at least as far as I was concerned. This one had come in via the suite’s third roommate, whom I knew and liked, and who arranged the whole three-way rooming situation without me or the Christian ever meeting one another until it was too late. The Christian was definitely not anyone I would have gone out and recruited to room with on my own, although in fairness, he didn’t much care for my lifestyle or what rooming with me involved, either. The arrangement ended up being highly temporary, anyhow. I remember that he was from upstate Indiana, was fervently involved in a college organization called Campus Crusade, and had numerous pairs of dress chinos and blue blazers and Topsiders, and a smile that looked as though someone had plugged him in. He also had an equally evangelical Christian girlfriend or platonic female friend who would come over a great deal — she practically lived there, from what I could see — and I have a clear, detailed memory of one incident when the three of us were all in the communal area, which in these dormitories’ nomenclature was called the ‘social room,’ but in which I often liked to sit on the third roommate’s soft old vinyl sofa alone instead of in my tiny bedroom, to read, double on Obetrol, or sometimes smoke my little brass one-hitter and watch TV, prompting all sorts of predictable arguments with the Christian, who often liked to treat the social room as a Christian clubhouse and have his girlfriend and all his other high-wattage Christian friends in to drink Fresca and fellowship about Campus Crusade matters or the fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecy, and so on and so forth, and liked to squeeze my shoes and remind me that it was called ‘the social room’ when I asked them all whether they didn’t have some frightening pamphlets to get out of there and go distribute somewhere or something. In hindsight, it seems obvious that I actually liked despising the Christian because I could pretend that the evangelicals’ smugness and self-righteousness were the only real antithesis or alternative to the cynical, nihilistically wastoid attitude I was starting to cultivate in myself. As if there was nothing in between these two extremes — which, ironically, was exactly what the evangelical Christians also believed. Meaning I was much more like the Christian than either of us would ever be willing to admit. Of course, at barely nineteen, I was totally unaware of all this. At the time, all I knew is that I despised the Christian and enjoyed calling him ‘Pepsodent Boy’ and complaining about him to the third roommate, who was in a rock band besides his classes and was usually not around the suite very much, leaving the Christian and me to mock and bait and judge and use one another to confirm our respective smug prejudices.