The previous Christmas he had given Saul a book by Lenin. Saul`s friends had laughed at how little the ageing man knew his son, but Saul had not felt any scorn — only loss. He udnerstood what his father was trying to offer him.
His father was trying to resolve a paradox. He was trying to make sense of his bright, educated son letting life come to him rather than wrestling what he wanted from it. He understood only that his son was dissatisfied. That much was true. In Saul`s teenage years he had been a living cliche, sulky and adrift in ennui. To his father this could only mean that Saul was paralysed in the face of a terrifying and vast future, the whole of his life, the whole of the world. Saul had emerged passed twenty unscatched, but his father and he would never really be able to talk together again.
That Christmas, Saul had sat on his bed and turned the little book over and over in his hands. It was a leather-bound edition illustrated with stark woodcuts of toiling workers, a beautiful little commodity. What Is To Be Done? demanded the title. What is to be done with you, Saul?
He read the book. He read Lenin`s exhortations that the future must be grasped, struggled for, moulded, and he knew that his father was trying to explain the world to him, trying to help him. His father wanted to be his vanguard. What paralyses is fear, his father believed, and what makes fear is ignorance. When we learn, we no longer fear. This is tar, and this is what it does, and this is the world, and this is what it does, and this is what we can do to it.