Four: Herbert’s Sentence
There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man — with human flesh. (P. 166)
From Dune, Frank Herbert, Chilton Books, 1965
Dune is by far one of my favourite books. The story is rich and complex, set in the far future of humanity in a post-AI (or thinking machine) feudal interstellar society. But this collection of sentences isn’t meant to be a place for me to discuss the books themselves. It is meant to create a repository of wonderful sentences that have moved me, that I would want to share. Firstly, I must acknowledge that Frank Herbert’s writing is amazing. It isn’t easy to keep a person like me, who has rarely found reading fiction enjoyable unless it came in a short story format, hooked to such an extent that I ended up, in about a year, reading the entire series of 6 books, which themself span nearly 5000 years in the far future. This, too, is not the reason to choose this sentence. The entire book of Dune is filled with wonderful aphorisms and life lessons that Herbert uses to tackle the issue of messianic figures and society’s blind faith in them. The choice here is far too personal. The sentence is one from a collection of sayings by the protagonist, Paul Atreides, collected by his wife, Princess Irulan, who has, after the death of Paul Atreides, put them out as a history book. Each chapter of the book starts with a statement from this history within the Dune universe. The story of Dune is one that is set inside another, which is narrated in real-time by the characters. It almost feels like reading the history of another time. In this juncture of the book, where this particular sentence can be found, Paul’s father, Leto Atreides, is trying to share with his son his apprehension of the terrible burden of leading their people, which Paul would have to bear upon the imminent death of his father. The father, sensing the trap that they all had walked into, is letting the son in on a secret that only a select few are privy to. The father, in doing so, is reminding the son of the deep trust he has in him, at the same moment gauging the kind of leader the son would be, subtly guiding him to be a better man than the father himself.
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The father, fully aware of the terrible sacrifice he is about to make, shares a tender moment with his son away from the eyes of his court. The sentence beautifully captures the other side of the interaction, the son’s realisation that his father will soon be no more. Not the leader of the House of Atreides, not the powerful man that others look up to, not the trusted leader of the other great and small houses in the society that make up the Dune universe; but a father, a man who loves his son and spared no effort in raising and teaching him to be who he has become. Though the sentence does not capture the tenderness of a father’s love for his child, what it ends up highlighting is the child’s knowledge of his inability to save the father from the trap that has sprung. Even if the sentence is taken out of the context of the story of Dune, it still is a powerful sentiment for us all, that we too will be helpless as our parents age and that we must prepare for their inevitable departure.
Our parents, the ones who raised us, the ones who fought every step, tooth and nail, the ones whom we look up to, are mortal, no matter how invincible they seem to us. And as I age, I cannot help but be worried about them, being far away from them, not knowing what they are doing or how they are doing. I suppose that this is, to an extent, the same anxiety that they must feel for my well-being.
What the sentence represents, at least in my understanding, is the acceptance of the fragile mortality of our parents and the limited time that we have with them. It also shows the reversal of the fundamental relationship between parent and child, as caregiver and the cared-for. With the relentless march of time, the child becomes the caregiver and the parent, the cared-for. This role reversal comes at the heavy cost of watching your heroes turn frail and to watch them crumble.
I suppose many of us have had, at some point in our lives, to face this terrible reminder of our own parents’ limited time with us. To have to deal with your own mortality is difficult, but to have to watch a parent of yours go through that realisation and to be helpless to do anything, now that is a feeling that is difficult to describe.
Eventually, this sentence captures that helplessness and lays it bare for us to see. To make bare the inability of the child as the parent is about to face their end. A burden that every one of us will bear at some point in our lives. I wonder, even though this is a circumstance that everyone must confront at some point in their lives, what would a sentence of this nature look like if the parent were to write it instead of the child?
