Secrets of the Father Revealed

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1909, p66.) Frederick Nietzsche wrote "What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I have found in the son the unveiled secret of the father." Nietzsche's propensity toward the dark and nihilistic viewpoint of life notwithstanding, he was actually talking about the realization of the father in the son, how fathers often view their sons as their passage to immortality. And sons, in turn, come to see their fathers in themselves, for good or ill.

He wrote this book between 1883 and 1885, a mere four years before his mental breakdown. It is theorized he may have had his own father's illness in mind when he wrote this line. (Cybulska, p510.) His fear of having his father's "softening of the brain" illness is admitted in a letter to Carl von Gersdorff in 1876, when he was 32. "My father died at 36 from a brain infection and it is possible it will go even faster with me." This may have been the impetus for him to resign his Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel while he was 35 years old. His influence on religion, and the negativity which arose from it, may come from the combined facts that his father was a pastor and died when he was four and half, and as the eldest male making him the de facto 'man of the house.'

E. B. White's Once More to the Lake and Scott Russell Sanders' The Inheritance of Tools give us two different examples of what Nietzsche might have meant by his famous line. While White is reflective from the view of a father watching his son and thinking of his own father, Sanders gives us a reflection of his father from a son's point of view as he remembers his father.

When examining E. B. White's More to the Lake, White reminisces about the way life along the shore was as he tries to pass along a tradition to his son. All the while, he keeps thinking about how so many things has changed even as he attempts to recreate his youth. Along the way his memories and his experiences get tangled up and he sees both sides of the 'truth', from his own youthful memories and the realization of how it must have been to be his father.

I seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something and suddenly it would not be I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture. It gave me a creepy sensation. (195.)

Everywhere we went I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one walking in my pants. (198.)

In the end, White comes face to face with his own mortality, something his father must also had to face at some point.

Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small soggy, icy garment. As he buckled up the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death. (199.)

But in that moment we can see the promise visible in his son. Even though the world has moved on and the world changes, some things don't. The promise of immortality through the traditions passed along to his son, as his father did for him, offer a(n) (unspoken) reprieve to his "chill of death."

In an examination of Scott Russell Sanders' Inheritance of Tools, we see the tradition passed along from grandfather to father to son, and appreciate the rich history of his family.

The hammer had belonged to him, and to his father before him. The three of us have sued it to build houses and barns and chicken coops, to upholster chairs and crack walnuts, to make doll furniture and bookshelves and jewelry boxes. (203.)

As his father and grandfather had done before him, Sanders has passed along the same tradition of tools to his daughter and son. "So I have seen my apprenticeship to wood and tools reenacted in each of my children, as my father saw his own apprenticeship renewed in me." (205.)

Sanders knows who he is, as his father and grandfather knew who they were. The skills the father passed along were physically tangible in creation of home and furniture. But what was also passed along was something intangible, and more important to Sanders than the physical. "The tools in my workbench are a double inheritance, for each hammer and level and saw is wrapped in a cloud of knowing." (207.)

Upon learning of his father's death, Sanders describes a frantic rush around the looking for something (a door?). He ends up in the basement staring at tools inherited from his father. It calms him and he seems to know just what to do.

I then I took up the hammer and went back to work on my daughter's wall, snugging the bottom plate against a chalk line on the floor, shimming the top plate against the joists overhead, plumbing the studs with my level, making sure before I drove the first nail that every line was square and true. (208.)

Sanders deals with the death of his father by going back to work, using the tools his father gave him, and feeling the comfort of both the tools and the traditions have afforded him all these years.

All three, Nietzsche, White, and Sanders, have different perspectives on their fathers, and their relationships with them. They even have different views of how they are the secrets of their fathers revealed (Nietzsche's perceived early grave, White's mortality realized and Sander's continuation of tradition). But each is an example of how life is both stagnant and ever changing.

The secrets of the father, in the sons revealed.

Works Cited

Eva M. Cybulska, PSYCHIATRY AND THE MEDIA "Nietzsche: madness as literature"Psychiatric Bulletin (1997), 21.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, p66. (The actual quote, as translated by Thomas Common in 1999, is "What the father hath hid cometh out in the son; and oft I have found the son the father's revealed secret." The original German text being "Was der Vater schwieg, das kommt im Sohne zum Reden; und oft fand ich den Sohn als des Vaters entblößtes Geheimnis." Since my German is nonexistent, I will have to defer to Thomas Common's translation.)

Scott Russell Sanders, "The Inheritance of Tools", The Arlington Reader (2nd Edition), pp 202-208

E. B. White, "Once More to the Lake", The Arlington Reader (2nd Edition), pp 194-199

Works Consulted

Friedrich Nietzsche - Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche

TeaOli "Then Comes Spock", 16 November 2009, http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5208934/15/Then_Comes_Spock (The German and the reference to Common's work came from this work's own footnotes.)