An Uncertainty Principle and the Benefits of Doubt

There is no primary father To be a father cannot be decided or improvised. it is something inherited. Which is to say that one has to know how to inherit, for inheritance has nothing passive about it, nothing acquired without effort. Inheritance is a weighty affair. One may even be tempted to escape from it, to continue the thoughtless playing of childhood, when with luck one has not yet inherited anything, when one rejoices, still in the present, still free to enjoy the past and the future, free from the weight of the years, from the weight of projects, from the weight of memory that slowly, imperceptibly accumulates.

All this catches up, however, and one day you are served a chalice that you hesitate to drink from, even when unaware of its bitterness. It is given to you on a day of celebration and you can even believe that there is only pleasure in it; you can even not recognize the cannibal feast, the obscure murder that presides over your promotion. You do not wish to know about this; not that you pretend ignorance, but because something heavy is being laid over your childhood larks. You do not understand the offer made to you. It is that, on the side of the future, there are faces with the strained anxious smiles of those in a hurry to see you get to where they are, who hope that you will reassure them, that you will not escape, that no-one escapes.

You are not yet a father, however. You will not become one in giving life to your future murderer either. You become a father when you can tolerate knowing and not knowing A father is uncertain uncertain not only concerning paternity (this is the classic sense), but simply uncertain. To be a father is to approach truth while accepting the uncertainty that alone opens the door to successors