Next week Americans will choose a new president, and still the world continues to be scorched by wars and famine, and I feel ashamed that I have nothing to say about any of it. I watch the cruelties of war on my laptop each evening, yet I have no comment. Apart from repeating the mantra that it is better to light a candle rather than curse the darkness. Which in my opinion means it’s better to speak positively about life no matter how dark it gets.
Last week I was on stage in Cork reading from my memoir about my father when someone in the audience asked me what I would wish to hear from him if he were alive today. I said that I hoped he would be proud of me.
That resonated with the audience. I could hear a pin drop. And I knew that by accident I had stumbled on a profound truth; that the one thing a person needs to hear from their father is that they are proud of their child. It astonishes me how words of encouragement can build young people up, whereas a spiteful comment can break someone’s heart.
Men sometimes think that their duty is to provide nourishment and material comforts for their children, or advise them on how to live, or steer them into the best careers. But no matter what mistakes or flaws or stumbling starts a child may have, all they really need to hear is that their father is proud of them. Because praise is a flame that ignites the fire of hope in every young person.
On the other hand words can be destructive. Psalm 64 suggests that the tongue is like a sharp sword. That words are like deadly arrows and once they leave the bow they can never be taken back.
I knew a woman years ago who wore straw hats in summertime but in winter she covered her head with hats resembling battered tea cosies. She was renting a cottage in a remote corner of the country, surrounded by lonely bachelors, as she dreamed of being an artist.
For an entire year she endured the rain on rushy mountain slopes and the old farmers would often rap her kitchen window looking for a lift to the village in her Renault 16. Men whose only outing was to the post office for the dole or the pub for company. And sometimes they lingered in her kitchen, falling asleep beside the range from exhaustion and waking on the verge of tears they themselves did not understand. That was in the 1970s, when many such men were afflicted by words spoken decades earlier, and humiliations echoing through their limbs from childhood cruelties.
My friend with the straw hat only lasted a year in the country. She moved back to Dublin, and I remember spending an evening with her 20 years later, on a patio surrounded by red azaleas and begonias and a bunch of her husband’s friends as they all drank wine and dined.
Someone inquired about the name of a particular plant and her husband said, “You better ask herself; she’s the artist”. And indeed she named the plant and even gave a little erudite description of its behaviours.
Someone said, “You surely know a lot about plants.”
To which her husband swiftly replied, “Sure why wouldn’t she? With nothing else to do all day and no one to mind only herself.”
Maybe he didn’t even mean to wound her. But there was an edge to the way he called her “the artist”, in inverted commas; as if her thin attempts at painting were a trivial matter.
And yet that was not the deepest wound. It was the joke about her having nothing to do all day that hit the target. Because it was no secret that when they first married, she had bought a cot before the expectation of her pregnancy had been fulfilled, and I for one knew that the cot lay in the attic, an empty silence gathering dust for years.
I could hear something dying inside her as he spoke.
So words can surely wound. Like the father who says he’s disappointed with the child, or the husband who tosses a phrase in the air as lethal as a missile.
Everyone knows that lighting a candle is better than cursing the darkness but I’m bracing myself for the American election; because there’s going to be a lot of talking when it’s over.