Therefore, my dear sir, I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, the burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside. From the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to whom he has attached himself.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is,to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it - but take whatever comes with great trust, and only if comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

Everything that you can think in the face of your childhood, is right. Everything that makes more of you than you have heretofore been in your best hours, is right. Every heightening is good if it is in your whole blood, if it is not intoxication, not turbidity, but joy which one can see clear to the bottom. Do you understand what I mean?

You have to see through their outbursts to the drama being played out. They are not disobeying you personally, they are freeing themselves from the archetypal mother and father. Believe it or not, you are not the object of their anger, even if they think so and lead you to believe it. They need to be free of any form of overbearing and limited version of Father and Mother. They need to grow up and ease out of the family circle and move into a larger world where they will find new avatars for the archetypal parents. If you can be therapeutic rather than reactively personal, you can help the child mature. Yes, it takes some stamina from you, but that’s a small price for the deep satisfaction of being an effective parent. Besides, the situation could help you grow up, too, so you won’t be expecting others to obey you and honor your every word. You, too, need to be free of the weighty archetypes of Father and Mother. You need to grow out and escape from a limited, heavy, suffocating role.

The immensity is the story; the rest is situation. That this son must come into his own by making war not on a parent who is willful and self-involved (which he is) but on one filled with the tender regard that alone gives a growing creature the ability to declare itself (which he also is). This is the thing the reader is meant to register; this is the narrator’s wisdom. It is the betrayal of love that is required in order that one become.