Loving a person means seeing him according to God’s plan that his parents didn’t manage to carry out.
– Marina Tsvetaeva.
The great Modernist poet was right. Love allows one to see a person in the still-undamaged state that only exists very deep inside the person.
It’s not a terribly clear phrase to me, maybe because it’s been translated. For me, it’s not a parent’s role to carry out God’s plan for a child, it’s to enable that child, to equip him or her with the necessary to go out into the world and carry it out for him or herself.
And I don’t really see where another person’s love comes into it. Or are we talking about personality/character/soul etc. Or does it mean that parents are unable to see the real person in the child? You see? I’m not clear about the meaning.
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Tsvetaeva says that God intends us to be happy, free, fulfilled and joyful. But parents mess us up and create tortured, miserable people instead. And only those who love us can see the happy, free, fulfilled people we could have been without all that damage.
The post was written for N. who, like Tsvetaeva, is Russian. He really understands what this quote is about. This is a profoundly patriarchal culture where parents can literally do anything they feel like to the children of any age and everybody will applaud.
I was watching this Russian TV show the other day about a mother and a teenage daughter. The daughter was very much in love with her first boyfriend, so the mother seduced him right in front of the daughter. Just went ahead and had sex with him in broad daylight with the daughter in the room. Now the mother is living with the boyfriend. The daughter ran away and was severely depressed for over a year. On the show, the mother was taunting the girl, trying to get her to kill herself.
“You are so weak and pathetic that you won’t even commit suicide,” the mother was repeating. “Go ahead, kill yourself, you weakling. You were always useless and ugly.”
Everybody in the audience was firmly on the mother’s side and heavily critical of the daughter.
“She gave you life, you ungrateful brat,” people were yelling at the girl. “Now she is entitled to take everything you have back.”
And this is one of more hopeful cases because the girl still managed to escape and is now living on her own. The number of people who never even dare to question the right of their parents to dispose of their lives and never learn to live and function on their own is staggering.
This is what a patriarchal family is like.
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Thank you! 🙂
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Congratulations!
I would only change the quote to “that life didn’t manage to carry out.”
Look at the beauty:
http://www.demilked.com/surreal-self-portraits-14-year-old-fiddle-oak/
There are more his photos on the net.
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Thank you!
Tsvetaeva is not afraid of placing the blame where it belongs. Vagueness is not for her. This is why she is my favorite poet.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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