A Mission

The story of a precocious child...

 

A Mission

 

 

  "People keep themselves busy all the time so as not to think, but I want to think, ergo I don't want to be busy all the time."

  "You're a clever sod, aren't you? Now go and get the paper."

 

   Patrick was a precocious child and his father knew it, liked it, and wanted to protect him from the evils of a world designed by and for lesser mortals. He was a teacher and knew that Patrick found little common ground with his friends and classmates. He feared that fast-tracking through school and posing in his mortar-board for photographs before he was shaving regularly would bring its own set of problems, and keeping him busy (sport, chess, music, fishing) wasn't working. He only wanted to read. He had grown out of science-fiction by the age of eleven ('absurd'), and now, three years later, was reading authors such as Tolstoy ('penetrative'), Aldous Huxley ('flawed'), Dickens (‘it’s so obviously serialised'), and many more paperbacks from his father's ragged library.

   Patrick's obnoxious opinionating was reaching worrying levels of eclecticism. He read everything from literary biographies, through fishing magazines, to the tabloids, and could conceive an embryonic point of view from any source in no time at all. 'Footballers' wages wouldn't be what they are if the Luddites had succeeded', springs to mind. His father decided that he needed a mission; a mission that would occupy him while he sailed through school at the normal speed, without having to continually take his teachers to task for their mediocrity. He would observe Patrick, think, and coax him into a mission.

   On Patrick's fifteenth birthday one hefty present turned out to be an Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Patrick thanked his father, who suggested that he start with the Greeks and perhaps a little Eastern philosophy and then to cross-reference his way around the book until he found someone or something that met with his approval.

  "Most of the great thinking that's ever been done is in this book," he told Patrick. "Let's see if you're such a smart arse when you've got stuck into that."

   He secretly hoped that his son would take a real interest in philosophy and perhaps pursue it as a parallel course of study. He hoped it would make him realise that he wasn't the first clever person who had ever lived and would keep him quiet. This last desire was, at the time, wishful thinking, and on retrospect, ironic.

 

   Patrick's father eased himself into his study chair before opening the letter. It was as he had feared. After five years' preparation, Patrick was to become a Buddhist monk in Thailand. In a previous letter he had enumerated the 227 precepts that he was to abide by, and he now told his father that he had overcome his reservations about the thirty-fifth rule of training, 'I will not eat rice only working from the top down', and was going to take the plunge.

 

  'It's great Dad,' the letter read. 'Shame I won't be able to write to you any more. I'm on a mission!'

 

 

Reviews

[Richard Knox]

Very interesting story, with a great short-story twist at the end. Nicely written.

[unexpectedsparkle]

It's sort of sad-but in a way, the dad tried to take control of his son's life before, with ideas of where he should go, holding back his approval unless it lined up with what HE wanted, not his son.