The Sandcastle – Iris Murdoch

As far as I could find out, this novel has not been published in Italian. And I wonder wich kind of copyright reasons prevented it to be published in the USA too… maybe because the author was a friend of Sartre? It seems that all of her books have not been published in the USA. Very odd…

Anyway, let me say that this writer was a great surprise to me!

It doesn’t happen so much in this novel that takes place at the end of the  Fifties: the main carachter is a middle-aged school master (I think between 40 and 50) falls in love with a young artist and all his life is endangered, his marriage, his two children, his political future… At the end the young painter goes away and Mor, remains with his family and embrace the candidature as a member of the Parliament.

Iris Murdoch was so great in depicting the feelings and the faults of this man! It is not easy to take the part of a member of opposite sex, for a writer. She show us how Mor is just a man, who is not able to face the conformity of his environment, and she describe it very well in few lines here, when the lover is going away and he doesn’t manage to follow her because he is surrounded by his colleagues and friends:

(…) although Mor struggled in his seat he could not bring himself to get up. A lifetime of conformity was too much for him.

A counter-hero, at the end, who is incapable of telling his wife his reasons, a man who postpones explanations and who prefers to talk about silly issues to avoid more important and deep discussions.

He hardly takes a decision to go with his lover, and he immediately feels light-hearted, but this is just a sandcastle, because he is not able to go on accepting the consequences of this decision.

A very immature man, therefore. But we all have a bit of him in ourselves. This is why I suggest to read this book.

 

What do you really want for your children? – Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

The more I read on children management, the more I grow convinced that, before working on children, we must work on ourselves.

If a child curses, doesn’t eat, spits, is sad, first of all you, parent, shall work on yourself, because you probably curse, have some eating disorder, spit, are sad.

Do you lack of resilience? So will probably your child.

Do you suffer from depression? So will probably your child.

Do you always give the fault of your situation to other people, economy, world? Well, so probably will your child

You would never guess that you harm your son by telling him to put gloves and cap before going out in the snow, would you? Well, it depends how and how often you tell this. You could nurture in him the fear for his health. And a fear, wichever it can be, it is alten a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My son is almost seven years old. Each day, while I wait for him coming out from his classroom, I watch the parents and the relatives chatting on the courtyard and on the road. Have you ever noticed how few persons are joyful? How few human beings are smiling?

Have you ever listened to their chats? They are usually criticizing other parents for doing or not doing certain things. If not, they are deploring taxes, low incomes, illnesses, weather, prices, meals, facebook, relatives, roads, doctors, jobs, neighbours, traffic, diets, religions, movies…

We are training children to grow exactly like we are.

We are stopped by our fears, and we tell them day by day. pay attention to this, pay attention to that… We focus on problems, instead of solutions. We live in the past or in the future, forgetting the present. We regret to be judged, but we judge every step we take.

We are opting for heavy lives and are robbing our children of choice power.