Back in the days of Stella I was capable of writing love letters. Manly ceasefire agreements, declarations of devotion to a feminine creature who was everything to me: lover, mother, deliverer from ignorance, midwife and wet nurse of my awakening intellect, teacher, doorkeeper to the world, comrade, and proprietor proud to display her pupil. Was it not imperative for me to be grateful to her? So grateful that even then, long—very, very long—before you were born, I wished you would meet someone like her before you were spoiled by the bias of having to prove yourself a man by excelling, unless it be intellectually.

I bestowed upon Stella what my turbulent emotional life was boiling over with. I wrote and thanked her for showing me the way back to myself. Yes: to myself as a child, as a human being, a child of man. Still in a condition of innocence—innocent also of the offenses others had committed against me, not yet grown into the conflict between the son of a whore raised like an aristocrat and the poor boy condemned to live among philistines, still in possession of what everyone born of woman ought to be granted: an unfettered mind. Unfettered enough to be receptive to the virtues of humanity: freedom from prejudice; courage to be oneself; and above all, disengagement from oneself, insight into oneself, and the recognition that one is part of a great game—and the serene pleasure of watching the game even when it’s shitty, and laughing at it—laughing in the cheerful comfort of cynicism and including yourself in this liberating laughter.

You will grow up, my son, and will come upon these pieces of wisdom from your father and find them to be annoying, tedious clichés more likely to hinder than help you be yourself. I don’t have to tell you that this situation is repeated from generation to generation. It’s not just resistance to fathers that is repeated, but rather resistance through them and beyond them, to the natural order of things in life and in the world. Resistance to life’s awkwardnesses, with which the fathers couldn’t cope either. Sons don’t grant fathers the right to speak wisely about things they themselves—the fathers—couldn’t cope with.

And so, little man, I won’t pester you with the things that weigh me down, the insoluble problems of this world, one of which is the relationship of fathers and sons. I love you and want you to know that none of my loves—and there were many—was purer, more unselfish, more heartfelt than my love for you. When you were born, I picked you up and looked you in the eye so that in you I could see my resurrected self. Myself, cleansed of all the blemishes clinging to me. Should I enumerate them for you? It would be not just the story of a life with everything that made it understandable and perhaps also forgivable—the story of unfulfilled and falsely fulfilled dreams; the story too of chance occurrences, of circumstances inextricably tangled together over which the person caught in their net has no influence; the story of an era—and how could I explain all that to you except in a book? A book that would burst the bounds of all literary categories and be untellable in its diversity, complexity, and confusion. A book that could explain to you not just me, but also—in order to explain myself—the quicksilver spirit of the times into which I was born, in which I lived, live, and shall live, thousands of days of drawn breaths and breaths yet to be drawn, days that lend the contents of their predecessors kaleidoscopically new and varied significance, overlapping like the lenses of a telescope through which you can simultaneously see far away and up close, both magically abstracted from yourself.