The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Mister Rogers on the Most Important Mindset for a Parent

By Maria Popova

Mister Rogers on the Most Important Mindset for a Parent

Being responsible for ourselves, knowing our own wants and meeting them, is difficult enough — so difficult that the notion of being responsible for anyone else, knowing anyone else’s innermost desires and slaking them, seems like a superhuman feat. And yet the entire history of our species rests upon it — the scores of generations of parents who, despite the near-impossibility of getting it right, have raised small defenseless creatures into a capable continuation of the species. This recognition is precisely what made Donald Winnicott’s notion of good-enough parenting so revolutionary and so liberating, and what Florida Scott Maxwell held in mind when she considered the most important thing to remember about your mother.

And yet to be a parent is to suffer the ceaseless anxiety of getting it wrong.

A touching antidote to that anxiety comes from Fred Rogers (March 20, 1928–February 27, 2003) in Dear Mister Rogers, Does It Ever Rain in Your Neighborhood? (public library) — the collection of his letters to and from parents and children.

Mister Rogers

Writing back to a young father-to-be riven by anxiety about the task before him, Mister Rogers offers:

Parenthood is not learned: Parenthood is an inner change. Being a parent is a complex thing. It involves not only trying to feel what our children are feeling, but also trying to understand our own needs and feelings that our children evoke. That’s why I have always said that parenthood gives us another chance to grow.

In a sentiment that applies as much to parenting as it does to any love relationship — one evocative of Iris Murdoch’s superb definition of love as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real” — he adds:

There is one universal need we all share: We all long to be cared for, and that longing lies at the root of our ability to care for our children. If the day ever came when we were able to accept ourselves and our children exactly as we and they are, then I believe we would have come very close to an ultimate understanding of what “good” parenting means. It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance and ultimate understanding — and often far short. But the most important gifts a parent can give a child are the gifts of our unconditional love and our respect for that child’s uniqueness.

Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf

With the mighty touch of assurance that is personal experience, he reflects:

Looking back over the years of parenting that my wife and I have had with our two boys, I feel good about who we are and what we’ve done. I don’t mean we were perfect parents. Not at all. Our years with our children were marked by plenty of inappropriate responses. Both Joanne and I can recall many times when we wish we’d said or done something different. But we didn’t, and we’ve learned not to feel too guilty about that. What gives us our good feelings about our parenting is that we always cared and always tried to do our best.

Couple with Kahlil Gibran’s timeless advice on parenting, then revisit the young single mother Susan Sontag’s 10 rules for raising a child.

BP

The Importance of Being Scared: Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska on Fairy Tales and the Necessity of Fear

By Maria Popova

The Importance of Being Scared: Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska on Fairy Tales and the Necessity of Fear

“If you want your children to be intelligent,” Einstein is credited with proclaiming, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Intelligence, of course, is a loose grab-bag term that encompasses multiple manifestations, but the insight attributed to Einstein applies most unequivocally to the ninth of developmental psychologist Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences: existential intelligence. Fairy tales — the proper kind, those original Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen tales I recall from my Eastern European childhood, unsanitized by censorship and unsweetened by American retellings — affirm what children intuitively know to be true but are gradually taught to forget, then to dread: that the terrible and the terrific spring from the same source, and that what grants life its beauty and magic is not the absence of terror and tumult but the grace and elegance with which we navigate the gauntlet.

Art by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. (Available as a print.)

This notion was at the heart of J.R.R. Tolkien view of the psychology of fairy tales. Nearly a century later when, in retelling Hansel and Gretel, Neil Gaiman asserted that “if you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, knowledge of, or understanding of dark things when they show up.”

The great Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012) makes a wonderfully spirited case for the developmental gift of frightfulness in Nonrequired Reading (public library) — that magnificent prose collection of her responses to and riffs on books she devoured during one voracious reading binge in the 1970s, which also gave us her meditations on what books do for the human spirit and how the prospect of cosmic solitude can enlarge our humanity.

wislawa_books
Wisława Szymborska

In a piece titled “The Importance of Being Scared” — a reflection on the first edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, which revolutionized storytelling — Szymborska writes:

Children like being frightened by fairy tales. They have an inborn need to experience powerful emotions. Andersen scared children, but I’m certain that none of them held it against him, not even after they grew up. His marvelous tales abound in indubitably supernatural beings, not to mention talking animals and loquacious buckets. Not everyone in this brotherhood is harmless and well-disposed. The character who turns up most often is death, an implacable individual who steals unexpectedly into the very heart of happiness and carries off the best, the most beloved. Andersen took children seriously. He speaks to them not only about life’s joyous adventures, but about its woes, its miseries, its often undeserved defeats. His fairy tales, peopled with fantastic creatures, are more realistic than whole tons of today’s stories for children, which fret about verisimilitude and avoid wonders like the plague. Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays (as today’s moral tales insistently advertise, though it doesn’t necessarily turn out that way in real life), but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned.

1924 illustration by Kay Nielsen for ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’ by Hans Christian Andersen

Complement this particular fragment of the thoroughly terrific Nonrequired Reading with Neil Gaiman on the allure of scary stories, Flannery O’Connor on why the grotesque appeals to us, and the most beautiful illustrations from 200 years of Brothers Grimm fairy tales, then revisit Amanda Palmer’s enchanting readings of Szymborska’s poems “Possibilities” and “Life While-You-Wait.”

BP

Dostoyevsky on What Makes a Good Person

By Maria Popova

Dostoyevsky on What Makes a Good Person

We know good people when we encounter them, when they fall upon our lives like a sunbeam, like a song. But we don’t always know what makes them good. It has, of course, a lot to do with kindness. It has to do with their capacity to give, and also to receive. It has to do with their courage of uncertainty. And yet like all the great truths, the essence of a person, the goodness of a person, is both clear and ineffable.

In the bleak Siberian winter of 1856, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) — thirty-five, dreaming of being a writer while stationed at a labor camp, having narrowly escaped a death sentence that had given him a lucid glimpse of the meaning of life — sent his older brother a letter of introduction to a young friend whose goodness had touched his life, had changed it. “In the most selfless way he has undertaken to look after my concerns and help me with all his might,” Dostoyevsky tells his brother, “and he loves me.”

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1871

Throughout the ten-page letter, he goes on to enumerate his friend’s noble qualities. Pulsating beneath the particular is a simple, precise articulation of what makes a good person in a universal sense. (In one of the most logically elegant and morally compelling arguments for humanity, Dostoyevsky believed there are no bad people — which is precisely what renders his concern with goodness all the more commanding.)

“He is a very young, very gentle person,” he writes, “but with a strongly developed point of honor, incredibly kind.” In describing his friend’s modest education and intellectual disposition, he makes a subtle, profound point — it is far better to enjoy studying than to be overeducated.

“I live in great poverty,” Dostoyevsky tells his brother, “deny myself everything, and in the meantime I’ve made debts!” Perennially penurious, he was constantly asking friends, relatives, acquaintances, and even near-strangers for loans, which he rarely repaid. His young friend frequently helped him financially and not once asked for the money back, implicitly understanding that money is not a special species of resource, but — like time, like love — just another form of energy that circulates between us, flowing toward where it is most needed. “He blushes when I start up about my debt,” Dostoyevsky writes, “and is even annoyed if I remind him of it” — a beautiful testament to the non-transactional nature of true generosity.

In a passage that calls to mind D.H. Lawrence’s timeless insight into the strength of the sensitive, Dostoyevsky arrives at the young man’s noblest quality. Observing that he is “prone to depression and rather over-anxious,” he reflects on the superpower of his friend’s vulnerability — one all the more needed in our Age of Outrage:

What infuriates and enrages someone else saddens him — the sign of a superior heart.

Couple with Susan Sontag on what it means to be a good human being, then revisit the day Dostoyevsky discovered the meaning of life in a dream.

BP

Against Brute Force: D.H. Lawrence on the Superpower of Vulnerability

By Maria Popova

Against Brute Force: D.H. Lawrence on the Superpower of Vulnerability

We live in a culture that has warped strength from the measure of our interior tenacity into the magnitude of our forceful self-assertion. We also live in a culture that has warped sensitivity from the measure of our porousness to life — the openhearted porousness from which all creative work springs — into a means of manipulation, extorting sympathy and slack, unconcerned with creation.

A century ago, D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) calibrated this loss of perspective in a lovely aside tucked into his writings about the ancient burial practices in different parts of Italy, posthumously published in the splendid collection of travel writings Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays (public library).

D.H. Lawrence

Considering the drama of life and death, and what it takes for life to persevere against the entropy that haunts it from the outset, he writes:

It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence.

Art by Kay Nielsen from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, 1914. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Lawrence observes how this quiet tenacity of nature, which is the opposite of violence, is mirrored in our greatest spiritual leaders and our highest achievements of civilization. In a passage nothing less than countercultural amid our present culture, in which the loudest and brashest is mistaken for the strongest, he adds:

Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.

Complement with Gwendolyn Brooks on vulnerability as power and Bruce Lee on yielding as an act of strength, then revisit D.H. Lawrence on the antidote to the malady of materialism and trees, solitude, and how we root ourselves when relationships collapse.

BP

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