Arguing over who we are

It strikes me that many arguments, especially within a family, are simply about who we are, and how someone else wants to change that. Perhaps it isn't convenient for them to be you; perhaps you are not who they dreamed of having as a son, daughter, brother, father, whomever. Perhaps you stand for something they fear. Perhaps you merely represent something for which they have contempt. (Possibly both of the last two are the same. I'm not sure.)

Much of the pain that I have experienced in recent days, and which I have found so crippling, goes back decades to exactly such an argument within my own family. They did not like what I was; could not see any use in it; feared it; scorned it. And therefore scorned me.

I came across the novel "A Thing of Beauty" for the first time only last year. It was written by A.J. Cronin, an author whom I like quite a lot, and published in 1955.

The novel is about a young man whose parents want him to follow in his father's footsteps as a respectable country Church of England pastor. He cannot. He simply cannot. He needs to draw and paint, and cannot do anything else. They cut him off and, in time, essentially disown him.

One sentence in the novel keeps coming to mind as I struggle to understand my own situation. It comes near the end, years after the young man left home, when it's already been years since he's had any real contact with his family.

He meets with his sister, who still lives in the old family home where she looks after their aged father. The sister says to him:

If you'd only been a good son, stayed at home, gone into the Church and helped Father, kept control over things, and over Mother, we'd still all be happy at Stillwater. You'd be loved and respected . . . "

He interrupts and says:

Instead of hated and despised.

And that's exactly how I feel: hated and despised. Actually, I feel more peace now, having recognized that fact, having accepted those very words, than I have at any time since that awful moment on Tuesday morning when I opened that email.

I should add that my sin was never that of being an artist. It's something much less, really. As near as I can tell, it's just the sin of having wanted a better life, a higher one, if you will. The sin of thinking that philosophy and the arts deserve a prominent place on the spectrum, rather than being given the back of the hand. Of wanting my days to be infused with poetry and the beautiful. Of preferring the high over the low and, sometimes, even over the middle. Of believing that questioning and careful exploration and the use of the best logic we can manage are preferable to superstition and dismissal and the acceptance of authority qua authority.

I'm willing, I suppose, to continue feeling hated and despised for those things. (Sometimes, though, the pain is renewed. And I do notice that years of this have exacted their toll.)