Women’s supposed penis envy for your little willy is nothing compared to your primeval envy because you cannot REALLY BEGET. You are condemned to abstract begetting: to replaying the world in its eternal self-renewal. Condemned to imitating and aping in eternally insatiable insufficiency. Everything you produce—abstract. Never life itself, but only an imitation of life, a destruction of life. And however much you curse this legacy from your father (I fear it will be the only one!) and hate me for it, you won’t be able to sever your connection to me. You too will feel the urge to play men’s abstract game of re-creating the world. Even if as the dutiful son of your mother you choose the honest path from desk chair to pension plan, nothing will keep you from building the Eiffel Tower with toothpicks in your spare time. And it may even be that your male inheritance has made you daring enough to lead you to the applied art of a potter or even to self-realization on canvas or in clay, plaster, or marble—or even on paper. Sometime someone will say admiringly behind your back and sotto voce, “He has it from his father. An excellent man.”—

—Just don’t forget the curse of being a man as well: a man who’s unaware of the curse remains at best someone who keeps the whole shebang going. It’s up to you to reinvent it completely.

But perhaps you’ll be too weak and lazy for that and remain an unfulfilled promise. I’ll still be enormously proud of you, and although it will be too late to tell you how much I love you, I always will—

namely, as
Your Father

•  •  •

Uncle Ferdinand’s thoughts on literature: