`Unavoidable Rubs and Uncertain Reception'

I’m blessed with boys who are not bullies, at least not in my company. Even the daintiest among us take pleasure, clandestinely, in the occasional abuse of others. This is human nature. By bully I mean a habitual thug, a predator, a scourge of the playground. We know them and remember them. In sixth grade it was Charlie Gray, who resembled the dome-headed, chinless Henry in Carl Anderson’s comic strip. Charlie was famous for cold-cocking kids in school corridors, and he once told a boy with copious acne that he had syphilis.

Once you have children you become vulnerable in ways you never imagined. I perform a perpetual two-step with my instincts for wanting to protect them and wanting them to be independent, and independence means knowing with certainty they will get hurt and will at least occasionally hurt others. In 1822, William Hazlitt wrote a charming essay, "On the Conduct of Life,” in the form of a letter to his son William, who was away at school. Hazlitt concisely and tactfully addresses this issue of protectiveness versus independence:

“You complain since, that boys laugh at you and do not care about you, and that you are not treated as you were at home. My dear, that is one chief reason for your being sent to school, to inure you betimes to the unavoidable rubs and uncertain reception you may meet with in life. You cannot always be with me, and perhaps it is as well that you cannot. But you must not expect others to show the same concern about you as I should.”

Hazlitt rightly encourages William to mind his own business, maintain his own moral inventory, and monitor the ever-present urge to vanity:

“Think that the minds of men are various as their faces -- that the modes and employments of life are numberless as they are necessary -- that there is more than one class of merit -- that though others may be wrong in some things, they are not so in all -- and the countless races of men have been born, have lived and died without ever hearing of any of those points in which you take a just pride and pleasure -- and you will not err on the side of that spiritual pride or intellectual coxcombry which has been so often the bane of the studious and learned!”

As a father, Hazlitt struggles mightily not to say “Because I told you so.” Like many of us, he vacillates among the roles of father, son and stranger, forever recalibrating the limits of his power. He’s aware the passive counterpart to the active bully is the whiner and all-too-willing victim:

“Do not begin to quarrel with the world too soon: for bad as it may be, it is the best we have to live in -- here. If railing would have made it better, it would have been reformed long ago: but as this is not to be hoped for at present, the best way is to slide through it as contentedly and innocently as we may. The worst fault it has, is want of charity: and calling knave and fool at every turn will not cure this failing.”

As an addendum, after expressing the hope that his son learns “Latin, French, and dancing,” he offers advice on what to read:

“As to the books you will have to read by choice or for amusement, the best are the commonest. The names of many of them are already familiar to you. Read them as you grow up with all the satisfaction in your power, and make much of them. It is perhaps the greatest pleasure you will have in life, the one you will think of longest and repent of least. If my life had been more full of calamity than it has been (much more than I hope yours will be) I would live it over again, my poor little boy, to have read the books I did in my youth.”