Far From The Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity

by Andrew Solomon

In the subconscious fantasies that make conception look so alluring, it is often ourselves that we would like to see live forever, not someone with a personality of his own.

Everyone is flawed and strange; most people are valiant, too.

My hard-won contentment reflects the simple truth that inner peace often hinges on outer peace. In the gnostic gospel of St Thomas, Jesus says, ‘If you bring forth what is within you,19 what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.’ When I run up against the anti-gay positions of modern religious bodies, I often wish that St Thomas’s words were canonical because his message embraces many of us with horizontal identities. Keeping the homosexuality locked away within me nearly destroyed me, and bringing it forth has nearly saved me.

Recent academic work suggests that people who know their condition to be irreversible are happier than those who believe their condition may be ameliorated. In such cases, ironically, hope may be the cornerstone of misery.

we all have our darkness, and the trick is making something exalted of it.

inclusion of disabled people ‘exposes the widespread dependence of people and nations on one another, dispelling the dangerous myth that individuals or nations exist naturally in a state of autonomy and that those individuals or nations that fall into dependence are somehow inferior to others’.

‘If we tolerate prejudice toward any group, we tolerate it toward all groups,’

Acceptance was always easier for my father than it was for my mother, but that was not particular to me; he accepts himself more readily than she did herself. In her own mind, she always fell short; in my father’s own mind, he is victorious. The interior daring of becoming myself was my mother’s gift to me, while the outer audacity to express that self came from my father.

When we love them, we achieve above all else the rapture of privileging what exists over what we have merely imagined.

Nirvana occurs when you not only look forward to rapture, but also gaze back into the times of anguish and find in them the seeds of your joy. You may not have felt that happiness at the time, but in retrospect it is incontrovertible.

Is the use of an inappropriate word evidence of prejudice if the user doesn’t know that the word is stigmatising?