the second son

Benjamin Sharkey

Up the hillside Cyril ran. Looking back, he saw his father and elder brother Basil, smiling, as they came trudging up through the rusty heather behind. High above the dale, the three took a seat among the heather. The boys held tight to their fathers’ hands as they waited, expectant. ‘There’, their father directed their attention, as the grouse tentatively popped their heads up, and picked their way through the undergrowth. ‘There’, cried Cyril, a rabbit now hopping out from its warren, and there, another. He stood up in excitement, causing the grouse to take flight, with rattling barking cries. He looked down at his father nervously, but his father was smiling up, laughing. He swept the two of them up in his arms, descending back the way they had come. The dale in which they lived opened below them in extraordinary splendour. The stream glimmered in the late afternoon light. Back in their grey-stone farmhouse, their father played with them on the rug, and after dinner, when they were ready for bed, he presented each of them with a new book. For Cyril, who had asked to know more about Alexander the Great, Arrian’s Anabasis, and to Basil, content to read his father’s recommendations, his own copy of Bunyan. In this way he helped his children to pursue everything that interested them, and so nurtured their curiosity.

A number of years later, and Cyril was approaching maturity. Basil had already left their child’s world behind him and had begun working with their father. The days of observing his brother, earnestly and doggedly following in their father’s shadow, filled Cyril with dread. The idea of all he had become, through his glorious freedom of play and learning, being subsumed into the drudgery of mindless duty, all that he had learned and been inspired to love, wasted on tasks without meaning or prominence, seemed horrendous. He had already begun to resent his father.

As the time he expected approached, Cyril thought it over, and decided to act. ‘If I do not get out of my father’s shadow now, I will never be truly my own, and I will have wasted all my interests.’ So, after dinner, he approached his father.

‘Father, I wish to go to university.’

His father was quiet for a time.

‘This is definitely what you want?’, he asked his son.

‘Yes father.’

‘Then of course you can go.’

The next day, their father withdrew most of his savings, and arranged the selling of one of the sheep fields. Come September, Cyril set out from his home in the dales, revelling in the excitement of the freedom that lay before him, in the great potential of all he believed he could become.

The university was a place of wonder for Cyril. The dizzying heights of intellectual prowess were on display. It was a world away from his image of Basil’s life, working in the dales. His brightness was readily rewarded, his curiosity turning to intellect, winning him the respect of teachers, and the admiration and jealousy of classmates. Here, he felt, he could now be his own, and be admired.

From the stories and myths he had been told, and read and loved before, he now turned to higher things with which he could cultivate his intellect, adorn his speech, and impress his teachers, to gain through fluency, respect. His wild imagination, he so conformed to intellect. From Homer and Virgil, he now turned more deeply to Classical learning. He admired the rhetoricians for their beautiful cleverness, while the Cyrenaic and Epicurean philosophers seemed masters, independent in their worlds.

He built his intellect upon a classical world, and elevated it with rationality. Spinoza, Hume, Voltaire, they shaped his intellect, and Byron his imagination. He saw in them a philosophy of

freedom, an intellectual effort to make man master of his own world.

He read those authors then in vogue among the most artificial youths of his age, decadents, the priesthood of the individual. He found in Hyusman’s A Rebours the revelation of a narcotic. It crept like poison through his blood. He lingered long upon its exquisite lines and they stared back and added a lust for experience to a pride in intellect.

It was the winter term of Cyril’s final year. The previous year’s exams had produced excellent grades for him. He now turned his cultivated intellect to other purposes. Rising from bed, dripping drowsiness, he pulled back the curtains, letting sunlight’s torrent hit the room. He sat at his desk before the window and looked over the notes for his latest writing: a piece for a student paper. He had taken to writing for many such publications, all displaying his skill of rhetoric, thought, and charm. Having quickly refreshed his mind, he lay the papers down. Such works were quickly written, always largely affected, yet their artifice still rarely failed to impress. A number of letters from his father lay besides these, un - answered. It was ] not that he was purposely ignoring them, but his thoughts rarely touched on them long enough to summon the will to reply.

They held for him the quiet and unacknowledged horror of the domination and demands of his father, which prevented even reading them. He picked up a comic novel, the kind that did not survive long in the public memory. Aristotle and Rousseau sat unattended, dust covered, their summarised arguments and key quotes committed to memory for ready deployment in exam or debate, ready to stun and impress. They had served to inform the intellect for its journey of self-liberation, and now lay idle. Cyril read for a long while, satiating his boredom with distraction, his fingers constantly poised, powdered, over a box of pistachio Turkish delight. But it was not enough to keep his lonely restlessness at bay. He rose, dressed, and headed to the common room, where he distracted himself with the company of friends, men as equally invested in the decadent mode of flaneurs, with whom he spent the summer and holidays, travelling, and experiencing life. The evening was spent attending a party, such as they attended every week, mere entertainment – the kind of parties where no one is really talking and no one really listening.

The summer sun was already setting when Cyril at last stamped his boots on the flagstones at the entrance of the inn where he was staying. His final exams had been mixed, but he had passed on to new endeavours. In the capital he had found employment, writing cheap novels, and lecturing on domestic aesthetics. Such lectures, already derivative cliches of an early Wilde, having since endured many recensions, were by now mere kitsch parodies. One such evening lecture, in a small town hall, brought Cyril back to the dales. Come the morning, Cyril set off walking (it being a while still before the coach back to the station). He set out down the dale, along the river bank, in spectacular sunlight, yet a distant sadness nipped at his heels.

In the fields around, pheasants shook off the

night’s cold, and rabbits came out gambling as the sun touched and wakened their hillside warrens. The peace and beauty of the surrounding country was monumental and yet, to Cyril, terrible. He climbed now along tracks among the rusty heather, where the grouse scuttled away upon white feathered feet, calling to one another with rattling cries. He stood now on the ridge’s plateau, surrounded by the heather beds, the dale stretching forth below him. The beauty of this country of his childhood, he saw now as though a ghost. He stared out, and saw only himself, in the way. He heard his voice in all the affected tones and turns it had taken in his lecture, he saw the draft pages of his novel in his rooms, ill-done, redundant.

The literature of old, which he had ravenously consumed, had helped him grow in cleverness, giving him the tools of rhetoric and argument, but there his respect for it had ended. He had outgrown, so he felt, the old authors, and yet he had barely any thought not adopted from some modern thinker. All his intellect he had committed to winning the praise of his teachers, to gaining marks, to gaining the admiration and jealousy of friends. To such things he had become bound, and yet in the end he had proved inadequate to live up to them, overtaken by his own appetites. While he had pursued independence, boredom and loneliness had overtaken him. It had been a long time since he had been able to bear his own company in simple thought and quiet. He had long sought to free himself, to become truly himself, no drudge like Basil, whose image had for so long become the antithesis of everything he wanted to shape his own to be.

In looking at the magnitude, the sublimity around him here now, he perceived clearly what he had become. He was not his own, but rather a product of others wills and influences, bound to their praise and their perception. He loathed the image of himself which he now saw, he hated its cruel contortions, its insincerity. Its declared independence mocked him as he saw all that he had hoped to become warped in what he had become. All his desires had been twisted against him; all his longings turned to dependent lusts.

He wept.

And in tears he saw clearly, as though written upon the countryside, the world his father had intended him for. How real it was, how alive, how deeply breathing, how unaffected, how great in its magnitude of detail, how unlike the university or the city. How good it all was, this world that his father had helped him to love, which had shaped everything that had been lovely in his desires. And how evil he now seemed.

He thought now, at last, of his father, of all he had done to help him grow, to help his desires become good. Even if Basil was not his own man, at least he had stayed in the shadow and footprints of a good man. He thought of his father’s workers. They had had not half the upbringing he had, yet if they were not free to pursue their independence, still they were better off than he, who, having had these things, found himself even less his own. For they at least worked for a man who had a purpose that was clear and good, while he served that which he hated!

He dreamed then of walking these dales again, of working in his father’s shadow, not like Basil, but like these workers; of feeling that he had at least some good nourishing purpose to work at, even if it was someone else’s.

Why should I not become part of that purpose,

even the least part of it? He asked himself. Might his father take him on as a worker? Even after all he had done? Even after he had disdained all the ideals his father had worked so hard to instil in him? He was still his father, and might there still not be the least some sense of familial responsibility? Through hard work, perhaps he could start to make amends. Cyril caught his train back to the capital and when he arrived at his apartment, he burned his manuscript and posted back the advance, and his rent notice. No turning back, not that he even considered it. He arrived back at the station in the dales and set off for his father’s farm. The whole way, he played over in his mind what he would say, what on earth he could say. His rhetoric failed him; nothing sounded right, everything affected, nothing matching his father’s character, everything revealing his shame. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him. No change could prevent him from recognising his son. As Cyril rounded the spur of the mountain, he saw his father coming down the mountain road, running. He had tossed his crook aside and his hat had blown away. Cyril could hardly comprehend it, hardly understand it, his father now with him, throwing his arms around him in a warm embrace. His smell, the long-forgotten smell of home, raising in him a tumult of childhood memories.

‘Father’, Cyril said weakly, his own arms hanging limp, uncomprehending at his side, ‘I do not know how you can ever look at me again, but I wish to work for you.’

His father seemed not to hear him, but kissed his head and stared earnestly into his eyes, ‘Come, come son, come,’ he said, pulling him by the shoulders to the car that had now arrived behind him, ‘You must ride in the front, so everyone can see! I have already sent Basil to call everyone in, there’ll be no work today!’

But Cyril was in tears, so his father brought him to sit beside him. ‘What is it, son?’

‘You do not know who I am, what I have become…’

‘Nay, but I know you have found your way here, and I see through these tears the face of the son I lost. That is enough to celebrate, and in the coming days you will talk and I will listen.’

Cyril’s father was as good as his word, and through long walks over pasture and heather, Cyril spoke as he had not spoken in years. He spoke without thought of praise, for he knew he deserved none, but yielded all his thoughts of shame to his father, and yet every time he looked at his father he saw that his love for him was unchanged. When at last his father talked, it was not as lesson or debate, he did not seek to influence, but rather, then, and in the months and years that followed, he guided Cyril to grow in knowledge of himself, and helped him to become what he wanted to become. For Cyril’s father knew him better than he knew himself, and remembered him before he remembered himself. Here in the dale, here in his father’s house, Cyril came more fully into possession of himself than ever.

His curiosity, which his father had once nurtured, was not wasted, but it was revived as Cyril returned, with new attention, to the poets and philosophers of his education and the stories and myths of his childhood, and he read more widely too. With his father there to challenge and encourage, he moved past mere intellect, and developed real wisdom. Plato, Boethius, Beowulf, Dante and Milton were constant companions in all his dealings, not masters but trusted friends, whether he was guiding sheep or working with the labourers, or indeed when war came, and his world was for a time darkened. And later when he had children of his own, wisdom helped him guide them as his father had guided him. Benjamin is a DPhil student working on the history of medieval Central Asia and its Christian communities. He studies at Magdalen College, which combines three of his loves: CS Lewis, Oscar Wilde, and deer!