Father’s Day, 2022. Lindsey’s taken us to Stanford, which is either the most perfect thing she could have done or the cruelest, depending on how you look at it. This is the place where my father taught. Where I grew up. Where I went to school. Every corner of this campus is a ghost, a memory, a version of myself I barely recognize anymore.
And here’s Charlie. One year old. One. This tiny human who doesn’t know about any of that history, who doesn’t care that we’re standing in front of Rodin’s Gates of Hell, that monument to damnation and desire that’s been watching over this place since before I was born. He just knows there are steps. And steps, when you’re one, are the entire universe. They’re Everest. They’re possibility.
So he climbs.
And I’ve got Also Sprach Zarathustra playing in the background because apparently I’m that guy now, the one who soundtracks his kid’s toddler mountaineering with Strauss, with that opening that Stanley Kubrick made synonymous with evolution and cosmic revelation. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The übermensch. The eternal return. All that Nietzschean grandiosity playing while my son hauls himself up stone steps one determined little fist at a time.
The absurdity is not lost on me.
Behind him, Rodin’s damned souls writhe in bronze, tumbling through Dante’s vision of eternal suffering. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. And in front of them, Charlie, who is pure hope, pure forward motion, completely unaware that he’s performing his own tiny drama about ascent and ambition right there at the threshold of hell.
This is what kills me about being a father: everything means too much now. It’s not just a kid climbing steps. It’s generations. It’s my father, who walked these paths. It’s me, who grew up here, who learned here, who became whatever I am in these shadows. And now it’s Charlie, who doesn’t know any of that yet, who’s just living in this perfect present tense where the only thing that matters is the next step.
My son. One year old. Climbing.
And Strauss swelling in the background like the universe is holding its breath.
Maybe it is.
.
The main thing is to be moved,
to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.
Be a man before being an artist!
Auguste Rodin
Rodin’s Gates of Hell
Stanford University