Friday, April 01, 2005

Fatherhood as a cliché

The gradual transition to fatherhood is a life changing experience. Initially nothing seems different - but slowly with the development of your wife's tummy, you start undestanding more about life - in short: what makes us humans tick. The coup-de-grace comes during the ultrasound when the transformation to a new person is complete. Seeing the child grow within the person you love brings forth strong emotions quite unlike others.

This whole life changing experience thing is a cliché used many a time before me in this context. But does this make our lives just a repetition of what others have been through?

Borges says, no story is new - it is just presented in a new way. But that is not the case with our lives. The reason why most of the written descriptions of our lives reads as clichés is that man has not perfected the art of translating feeling to spoken words. The feeling or emotion is individual/personal, whereas the written work is common/public.

The same is true of thought. We do not think or feel in a particular language. It is only when we try to communicate our thoughts or feelings that words come into the frame.

No comments: