"It is, of course, common knowledge that a child takes after both its father and its mother. And yet the distribution of the qualities and defects it inherits is so oddly planned that, of two good qualities which seemed inseparable in one of the parents, only one will be found in the child, and allied to the very fault in the other parent which seemed most irreconcilable with it. Indeed, the embodiment of a good moral quality in an incompatible physical blemish is often one of the laws of filial resemblance. Of two sisters, one will combine with the proud bearing of her father the mean soul of her mother; the other, abundantly endowed with the paternal intelligence, will present it to the world in the aspect which her mother has made familiar; her mother's shapeless nose and scraggy bosom and even her voice have become the bodily vestment of gifts which one had learned to recognise beneath a superb presence. With the result that of each of the sisters one can say with equal justification that it is she who takes more after one or other of her parents. It is true that Gilberte was an only child, but there were, at the least, two Gilbertes. The two natures, her father's and her mother's, did more than just blend themselves in her; they disputed the possession of her - and even that would be not entirely accurate since it would give the impression that a third Gilberte was in the meantime suffering from being the prey of the two others. Whereas Gilberte was alternately one and then the other, and at any given moment only one of the two, that is to say incapable, when she was not being good, of suffering accordingly, the better Gilberte being not able at the time, on account of her momentary absence, to detect the other's lapse from virtue. And so the less good of the two was free to enjoy pleasures of an ignoble kind. When the other spoke to you with her father's heart she held broad and generous views, and you would have liked to engage with her upon a fine and beneficent enterprise; you told her so, but, just as your arrangements were being completed, her mother's heart would already have claimed its turn, and hers was the voice that answered; and you would be disappointed and vexed - almost baffled, as though by the substitution of one person for another - by a mean remark, a sly snigger, in which Gilberte would take delight, since they sprang from what she herself at that moment was. Indeed, the disparity was at times so great between the two Gilbertes that you asked yourself, though without finding an answer, what on earth you could have said or done to her to find her now so different."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 608-609
In this passage Proust is reflecting on Gilberte's nature and its relationship to her parents. Since she's such an important part of the story I thought it was useful to include, and it also inspired a flood of memories and soul searching, which I'll explore below. I liked Proust's observation that, "The two natures, her father's and her mother's did more than just blend themselves in her; they disputed the possession of her - and even that would be not entirely accurate since it would give the impression that a third Gilberte was in the meantime suffering from being the prey of the two others." Obviously, parents do this all the time, contesting for control of the child by, clumsily, assigning positive attributes of the child to their lineage and negative ones to the other parent's genes. In the end the "third Gilberte" is actually the real Gilberte, and in this way she is the "prey of the two others," or maybe she's the prey of her parents' attempt to manipulate the two others.
One of my favorite memories of my son stretches back to the time, many years ago, when we lived in Atlanta. Gary was, probably, around five then. My best friend David was visiting from Cincinnati and we had gone for a drive and stopped at a restaurant somewhere. It was one of those places which encouraged you to scribble on the paper table cloth. David had drawn a bulls eye and asked my son if he knew what it was. Gary's response, which became famous in family lore, and utterly fitting for his precocious nature, was, "An olive in a vortex?" We all burst out laughing for several reasons, one of them being that it was an odd, insightful comment from an obviously odd, insightful kid, who was clearly the product of odd, insightful parents. The apple had obviously not fallen far from the tree. Having said that, I've always felt that, as much as people tried to identify him as a little version of me (his nickname as a child, after all, was little g), he was always much more like his mother. However, I remember having this realization when Gary was around twenty that he was also much like Brenda's brother Wayne, who sadly passed away quite young (and, I guess, genetically the similarity between an uncle and a nephew makes a lot of sense). Just as there was a "third Gilberte," there was a "third Gary," who was the actual Gary. He was, and is, after all, his own person and these attributes we recognize in him are actually tiny parts of his personality. That said, doubtless his best attributes came from his mother.
Finally, and briefly (because I do have a ton of papers to grade), I reflected on my own genetic legacy. Just as people always tried to turn my son into a little version of me (in my view it would be more accurate to describe him as a smarter and more handsome version of his father), there has always been a mythology that I was just a copy of my father. And, certainly, we do have many more similarities than differences, although in other ways we could not be more different (as is the case with most fathers and sons, clearly). As I've discussed previously, I've always felt a kinship to my grandmother Maude, who I think I may be most like; beyond the deafness and grey hair, we share a sharp wit and an even sharper tongue, but also were masters of vast inner kingdoms where we would too often hide. What I've begun to reflect upon is where was my mother's influence? I can't ever remember anyone pointing out that I was like my mother in anything. Lord knows we both have a temper, although even that took on different forms (as anyone can tell you, my temper is pretty volcanic, but it also lasts for around seven nanoseconds and then it's gone; my mother's was more mafia-esque and could transcend generations). Is it possible that I "inherited" (and I know it's nature and nurture) nothing from my mother's personality? Or, much like my efforts over the years to squelch my Hoosier accent, did I make a decision early on to suppress the part of my nature which mirrored my mother's? And, if so, why would I have done that? Truthfully, at this point I don't have an answer for this question, but it shows, at least to me, the value of this year (OK, more like years) reading Proust and using it as a tool of self-reflection. Of course, who knows where this will lead . . .
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