Introduction: Writing Patrimony: The Son's Book of the Father as a Sub-genre

Summary

There was once a father and a son. A son is like a mirror in which the father beholds himself, and for the son the father too is like a mirror in which he beholds himself in the time to come. […] And the father believed that he was to blame for the son's melancholy, and the son believed that he was the occasion of the father's sorrow - but they never exchanged a word on the subject.

Then the father died, and the son saw much, experienced much, and was tried in manifold temptations; but infinitely inventive as love is, longing and the sense of loss taught him, not indeed to wrest from the silence of eternity a communication, but to imitate the father's voice so perfectly that he was content with the likeness. So he did not look at himself in the mirror […] for the mirror was no longer there; but in loneliness he comforted himself by hearing the father's voice […] For the father was the only one who had understood him, and yet he did not know in fact whether he had understood him.

—Søren Kierkegaard, The Parables of Kierkegaard

A Modern Parable

A man has a son. Overjoyed at his son's arrival, this father goes to work as usual. This is Australia in the 1950s, after all, before the era of shared care and involved dads. Maternity wards were not places for men.