The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

part of life finding out for ourselves what has already been extensively and
painfully charted by others.
Romanticism has traditionally been suspicious of rules in child rearing,
regarding them as a fake hypocritical bunting unnecessarily draped over
children’s endearing natural goodness. However, after closer acquaintance with
a few flesh-and-blood youngsters, we might gradually change our minds and
come to the view that manners are in truth an incontrovertible defense against
an ever-present danger of something close to barbarism. Manners don’t have to
be an instrument of coldness and sadism, just a way of teaching us to keep the
beast-like bit locked up inside, so that the evening meal does not invariably have
to descend into anarchy.
Rabih wonders sometimes where all the immensely hard parental work is really
leading them—what the hours they have spent picking up the children from
school, talking to them and coaxing and reasoning with them, have been for. He
began by hoping, naively and selfishly, that he and Kirsten were raising better
versions of themselves. It’s taken him a while to realize that he has instead
helped to put on earth two people with an in-built mission to challenge him,
individuals who will inflict upon him repeated frustrations, frequent
bewilderment, and a forced, unsettling, and occasionally beautiful expansion of
his interests—far beyond anything he could ever have imagined—into hitherto
alien realms of ice-skating, TV sitcoms, pink dresses, space exploration, and the

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Hearts’ standing in the Scottish football league.
At the children’s school, a well-meaning small establishment nearby,
watching from some remove as the other parents drop off their precious charges,
Rabih reflects that life can never reward on a large enough scale all the hopes
which one generation places on the narrow shoulders of another. There aren’t
sufficient glorious destinies to hand, and the traps are too many and too easy to
fall into, even if a golden star and an ovation may be in the offing for a well-
delivered reading, in assembly, of a poem about ravens.
At times the protective veil of paternal sentimentality slips, and Rabih sees
that he has given over a very substantial share of the best days of his life to a pair
of human beings who, if they weren’t his own children, would almost surely
strike him as being fundamentally unremarkable—so much so, in fact, that were
he to meet them in a pub in thirty years’ time, he might prefer not even to talk to
them. The insight is unendurable.
Whatever modest denials parents may offer—however much they may downplay
their ambitions in front of strangers—to have a child is, at the outset, at least, to
make an assault on perfection, to attempt to create not just another average
human being but an exemplar of distinctive perfection. Mediocrity, albeit the
statistical norm, can never be the initial goal; the sacrifices required to get a
child to adulthood are simply too great.
It’s a Saturday afternoon, and William is out playing football with a friend.
Esther has stayed at home to put together the electronic circuit board she got for
her birthday a few months back. She has enlisted Rabih’s help, and together
they’re going through the instruction manual, wiring up bulbs and little motors
and delighting in those moments when the whole system whirs into action.
Rabih likes to tell his daughter that she would make a great electrical engineer.
He can’t quite let go of his fantasy of her as an adult woman who will somehow
manage to be at once entirely practical and yet also lyrically sensitive (a version
of every woman he has loved). Esther adores the attention. She looks forward to
the rare occasions when William is away and she has her dad all to herself. He
calls her Besti; she sits on his lap and, when he hasn’t shaved for a day,
complains about how strange and rough his skin feels. He brushes her hair back
and covers her forehead with kisses. Kirsten watches them from across the room.
Once, when Esther was four, she said to both her parents, with great seriousness,
“I wish Mummy would die so I could marry Daddy.” Kirsten understands. She
herself might have liked to have a kindly and reliable father to cuddle and build
circuits with, and no one else around to bother them. She can see what a

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bewitching and glamorous figure Rabih could seem to someone under ten. He’s
happy to get on the floor and play with Esther’s dolls; he takes her rock
climbing, buys her dresses, goes cycling with her and talks to her about the
brilliant engineers who built Scotland’s tunnels and bridges.
The relationship nevertheless makes Kirsten worry a little for her daughter’s
future. She wonders how other men will be able to measure up to such standards
of tenderness and focused attention—and whether Besti may end up rejecting a
range of candidates based on nothing more than the fact that they don’t come
close to offering her the sort of friendship she once enjoyed with her dad. Yet
what niggles Kirsten most of all is the sentimentality of Rabih’s performance.
She knows at first hand that the kindness he displays with their daughter is
available from him only in his role as a father, not as a husband. She has plenty
of experience with his drastic change in tone once the two of them are out of
earshot of the children. He is unwittingly planting an image in Esther’s mind of
how a man might ideally behave with a woman—notwithstanding that the ideal
in no way reflects the truth of who he, Rabih, really is. Thus Esther may, in later
life, ask a man who is acting in a selfish, distracted, and severe manner why he
can’t be more like her father, little realizing that he is actually remarkably like
Rabih—just not the only version of him that she ever got to see.
In the circumstances, it’s perhaps helpful that kindness has its limits and that
these two parents, despite their best efforts, still manage (like all parents)
regularly and deeply to annoy their children. Being outright cold, frightening,
and cruel turns out to be only the first of many different means of ensuring
alienation. Another quite effective strategy combines overprotectiveness,
overinvolvement, and overcuddling, a trio of neurotic behaviors with which
Rabih and Kirsten are deeply familiar. Rabih, the Beirut boy, frets about Esther
and William every time they cross a road; he seeks a potentially vexing degree
of closeness to them, asks them too often how their day was, always wants them
to put on another layer of clothing, and imagines them as being more fragile than
they really are—which is partly why Esther more than once snaps “Get off my
case” at him, and not without cause.
Nor, indeed, can it be all that easy to have Kirsten as their mother, for this
entails having to do a lot of extra spelling tests, being encouraged to play several
musical instruments, and hearing continual reminders to eat healthful foods—a
not entirely surprising set of priorities from someone who was the only student
in her secondary-school class to go to university, and one of a minority not now
living on benefits.
In certain moods Rabih can pity the children for having to deal with the two of
them. He can understand their complaints about and resentment of the power

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that he and Kirsten wield over them, their thirty-odd-year head start, and the
droning sound of their voices in the kitchen every morning. He has sufficient
trouble coping with himself that it isn’t too much of a leap for him to sympathize
with two young people who may have one or two issues with him. Their
irritation, he also knows, has its own important role to play: it’s what will
guarantee that the children will one day leave home.