Philosophy Masterclass from my 5-Year old Son

There is a trinity of books that I like and find associatively memorable. Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And an out-of-print book entitled Travels with A Son. The first two are classics in their own right: the pacy epitome of philosophy chic, Zen, and the lavishly dark The Road. These two books have one thing in common, summed up in the title of the third, Travels with A Son. While stylistically workaday, the latter has its own charms - for me, at least. Father and son travel through West Africa, my native land. I read two of these books even before I had a son, but there is something at once latent and lateral about the romance-tinged desire to go on a journey of some sort with my son (the first of two), maybe a philosophy-flavoured one as in Zen or a touristy ‘grand’ trip as in Travels with A Son. McCarthy’s ‘road’ and apocalyptic counterworld is a different literary beast - it is fiction, no less fascinating, though, for its exploration of father/son fellowship.

I travelled with my five-year-old son a few days ago. Oh, but the 4 am world I took him into was unlike Cormac McCarthy’s understated chaos in The Road. The London we drove into was a semi-empty world, sparsely peopled by zombie-quiet early-shifters, mostly smileless immigrant faces. I wanted to go and collect a car some 300 miles away. I set out in another car, but since no one can drive two cars at the same time, we switched to a red London bus somewhere along the line before finally settling in another red Virgin train at Euston.

We arrived in Hartford, collected the car and set out on a return journey to Kent. Would the five-year-old help relieve the drudgery of almost a quarter of a day’s journey? Well, perhaps in no better way than he relieved the train journey outwards. Daddy, where are we going? Why did we leave your car in London? Do trains speed faster than cars? I am bored. Can we go and see whether the restaurant is open now? Is the train going fast? I am bored. When are we going to get there? One minute? Two? How long is one minute? The poor boy is yet to grasp the speculative economy of time – he always lops time into simple nano-units. As for the antsiness - how else do you want a boy of five to orient himself to a suddenly messed-up biorhythm?

He was more settled during the return journey. While I was not too eager to begin a 4-odd hour drive, my beloved urchin was looking forward to the stops that I promised him at KFC or some other fast-food joints. I zapped the car radio from one channel to the other, impatient with everything I found; I was also looking for something that would interest my son. Anthemic Coldplay’s Paradise? Beethoven’s 7^th on Classic FM? And there was my favourite leftwing rambler on a talk radio station taking calls about the illegality of human taxidermy in the UK. I hate the idea of swaddling children up inside a draped cot of moral and visual pleasantness (a bed of roses, as it were); I’d rather they see the world for what it is - good and bad, ugly and beautiful. But I would not subject my eternally ‘bored’ son to a long radio discussion of why human cadavers are not stuffed and mummified for display purposes.

Then I’d run into Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror on a retrocast station.  

Me: You know who this is?

Son: Michael Jackson.         

Me: You like him... His music?

Son: Yep. (A pause) What year was he born?

Me: 1958.

Son: When was he a toddler?

Me: Late 1950s... Early 60s.

Son: When was he a boy, a boy like me?

Me: In the 1960s.

Son: When was he a teenager?

Me: 1970s.

Son: When was he a man?                                                                                   

Me: 1980s, 90s and the noughties.

Son: And when did he die?

Me: 2009.

Son: Why do people die?

Me: People have to die, or else there will be no houses for babies and toddlers to live. The world will be too full.

Son: Sometimes babies and toddlers die.

Me: Yeah, they do.

Son: Why?

Me: That’s...

Son: It’s not nice to die.

Me: Often, it’s not.

Son: Do people wake up when they die?

Me: No, they don’t.

Son: But Mrs Watson (his teacher) said Jesus woke up when he died.

Me: Did she?

Son: She said Jesus was woken by his father. Is that true, Daddy?

Me: What do you think?

Son: I don’t think it’s true. People don’t wake up when they die.

Me: No, they don’t.