Miao Wei is a writer and former deputy editor of Sanlian Life Weekly. In 2016, at the age of 48, Miao Wei became a father, and his son was named Dazhuang. When Da Zhuang was still in the Yuezi Center, he began to write letters to his son, which was posted on the public account "Master Miao", which was called "Letter to Da Zhuang".
<h4>Great English Dad</h4>
Text | Miao Wei
I read a report a long time ago that there was a saying engraved at the entrance to Wimbledon Club: when can you face victory and defeat and equate these two illusions.
Impressed by the truth contained in this sentence, I searched and learned that the verse came from the British writer Kipling.
In 2012, I went to London to see the Olympics, and one day the arrangement was to go to Wimbledon to see the quarterfinals of women's tennis.
That day, I walked around the entrances of the various courses to see where the poem was engraved. After looking around and not seeing it, they walked around the souvenir shop, which displayed pictures of The century-old history of Wimbledon, but there was no corresponding souvenir, and they could only sell those Olympic licensed products during the Olympic Games, and the Olympic licensed products had a sense of cheap FMCG.
I was bored when I looked up and saw a wooden plaque embedded in the beam of the house, and the light shone on it, impressively inscribed: If you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.
This is Kipling's verse, from the poem he wrote for his 12-year-old son, the name of the poem is If, and the whole text is an expectation of his son.
There are a couple of amazing good dads in The UK.
One of them was Kenneth Graham, whose son was nicknamed Rat, and when he was four years old, Kenneth told him stories every night, and the protagonists of the stories were animals: toads, moles, water rats, and so on.
When the rat was seven years old, he went to summer camp, and Kenneth continued to tell his son a story in the form of letters, and he wrote it down one by one, which became a book called "The Wind of the Willow Forest".
Another good dad was Tolkien, a professor at Oxford University who studied Old English and Norse languages, and he created his own elven language, fictionalized the elven community, and he told stories to his children every night, which became "The Spantine Diamond" and "The Hobbit", and he also wrote letters to his children under the guise of Santa Claus, writing for more than a decade about Santa Claus's life in the Arctic Circle.
These two dads must have loved their son very much.
Another great English father was The Elder Mueller, whose son was John Stewart Mueller.
The elder Mueller was a man of letters who had spent the first half of his life selling literature and wrote a history of British India.
Little Müller began to learn Greek at the age of three, and then read Greek works such as Aesop's Fables and Memories of Socrates. At the age of eight, he studied Latin and mathematics, then read Virgil's poems and Cicero's speeches, read the History of Rome, and learned to write poetry under the guidance of his father.
The Mueller family lived in the English countryside, and every morning the elder Mueller took his son for a walk, and the son would make an oral report on the reading of the previous day.
At the age of twelve, little Mueller read Ricardo's political economy and discussed the contents of the book with the elder Mueller, which was already considered to be higher education.
By the age of fourteen, Little Mueller had graduated from school. He later became a university scholar. In 1859, the year Darwin published On the Origin of Species, Little Mill published a book called On Freedom, from which some of the ideas we believe in today come from.
Old Mueller probably loved his son too, but he was too strict. He believed in the value of integrity and moderation, encouraged children to live a lifetime of suspense, not to indulge and be lazy, and he believed that most of the failures in life came from overestimating happiness.
Like the typical Englishman, he does not show his emotions very much, but he knows that if a person loses his curiosity, his life will become exhausted.
Old Mueller had too high expectations for his son, forcing him to embark on the road of scholarship, causing his son to have a mental breakdown, relying on the beauty of literature and the love of his wife to ease up.
Little Mill wrote a book", "My Road to Knowledge", which said that only gentle words can not make a child devote themselves to boring and monotonous learning, if education always advocates simple and interesting, then the child learns something superficial.
Ever since I beat you into your birth, I've felt a heavy responsibility, can I tell you stories as patiently as Kenneth and Tolkien did? Can I give you practical guidance on your studies like old Mueller did? Do I have plenty of love? Can I spark your imagination and curiosity? How can I urge you to study hard every day? In what ways can I be your role model?
I may have been a little worried, not too worried, and I knew Tolkien and Little Mueller before, but I didn't understand their stories from the perspective of father-son relationship.
I used to think that "The Wind in the Willows" and The Adventures of Kipling were too childish, but now I will pick it up and read it and prepare to tell it to you.
Returning to Kipling's poem, which sees both success and failure as an illusion, I read this poem and knew I couldn't do such detachment. Now I understand that the goal that a person expects does not have to be measured by the success or failure of reality, there are always some values that span thousands of years, and to pursue those valuable things, people will not be too tacky.
Kipling's "If", every verse is like a judgment question, where I can do it, I will tick, where I can't do it, I will put a cross, let's see what he said.
There is a sentence in the poem, don't look too good, nor talk too wise, this principle has a distinctLy British character, do not wear fancy clothes, do not show their faces, do not talk about it, and act and talk understatement. This is my favorite British style, and when your cognition is a little more complicated, you will know how rich there is in this low profile. A person can keep a low profile because he has a high standard, he has insight, he knows what the good things in the world look like, so that he will not do a little big thing and be complacent.
There are a few sentences that emphasize willpower: what you have painstakingly built will one day collapse, so build them up again. There is nothing on the body, only the will is shouting, resisting.
We're going to face a lot of losses, And lose, and start again at your beginnings, and Never breath a word about your loss, and this sentence is very difficult to do: Never breath a word about your loss. Sometimes we have to say something resentful, until the people around us start to hate us, and we realize that we are talking too much.
In general, though, anything you can do is relatively easy. The difficulty is to get along with others, let me copy a few original words:
If you can keep your head when all about you ，
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you。
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you，
But make allowance for their doubting too。
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating。
Man is a social animal, we all have to become a "social person", if there are people around us who are good at calculating profit, we have to take the risk of being a good person. Kipling's poem has too many moral exhortations to get along with people, as if to encourage his son to become the president of the student council, I guess you will be bored, but we still have to learn to get along with others, we have too many people here, more than a billion, more than the whole of Europe. There are more people, it is difficult for people to get along gently with each other, and the relationship between people will consume a lot of your energy.
There's a line in Kipling's poem, If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools. I don't like this very much, it's a bit self-righteous.
Let me say, don't feel that what you say is the truth, and always suspect that you may be wrong.
You may be a little impatient with all that Kipling has said, but he also said the way to crack it, If all men count with you, but none too much.
Take care of everyone, but don't take anyone too seriously.
Yes, don't take anyone too seriously.
(Excerpt from "Letter to Da Zhuang")
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