It’s not worth giving your children advice

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/oct/17/its-not-worth-giving-your-children-advice

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It is a matter of faith for a writer that words are the most important, almost sacred, mode of communication. But it strikes me how inadequate words in a family context are. To deliver the correct ones at the correct time to the right person is a demanding, almost impossible, task.

I want to use words within the family to impart information and pose questions – and not only information about what time dinner is and questions about where they dropped their socks. I want to impart knowledge to them – real important knowledge about how the world works. But here, words fail me.

Apart from anything else, whereas my children might once have come to me with a question about the world and how it works, it is now far more common for me to go to them with a question – usually about how a computer operates or doesn’t, or what some texting abbreviation or new quirk of language means.

I want to offer them the wisdom I have accumulated over my lifetime, but know that this is largely a matter of vanity. The wisdom of one person is the folly of another. Much as you would like to avoid your children making the same mistakes you did, making your own mistakes is part of developing as a human being. Even if that were not true, my children are not very interested in what I have to say about matters that are my focus as a novelist – the crooked timber of humanity, the denials that fuel the personality, the rigid fortresses we build around our fear of uncertainty. All the things I would like to tell them I cannot – because it would be pompous to pronounce them and because they wouldn’t want to hear anyway.

I received two pieces of advice from my father during his lifetime – “Always have a plunger handy” and “Always remember to tell your wife that you love her”. One of these pieces of advice has been useful but, on the whole, my father “taught” me just by being exactly who he was. He never spoke ill of anybody and he was honest and kind. I have tried to emulate him with varying degrees of success, but the messages I received from him were largely wordless. To find the words that will pierce the bubble of another’s world and enter their interior reality is the writer’s stock-in-trade, but it is all too plain how inadequate that gift is out there in the real world, as it were.

I have little idea what my children think of me – as a role model to be emulated or a carrier of mistakes to be avoided. Perhaps it doesn’t matter which it is, so long as they are learning, one way or another. But whatever is happening, they are learning less through words than through actions.

The life of the spoken word is fraught and fractured and full of culs-de-sac and false meanings. I spend an unusual amount of time living in silence, and I think it has a lot to commend it. In fact many of the most intimate times I have spent with my family have specifically been in silence – perhaps watching a movie together or driving down a long road to somewhere or other. Intimacy is almost defined by how comfortable you feel in a condition of quiet.

I’ll return to that silence now. But I conclude by saying that most families – most people – spend much of their time talking a lot and understanding one another very little. With the development of technologies such as mobile phones and computers, words have even less power, as it is harder to listen with all that other stuff going on. We put our faith in words, but they increasingly fail us and mislead us. All that is left is a dim static – and our behaviours. A smile. An embrace. A quiet forgiveness. An unspoken acceptance.

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