Latest news with #PhilipLarkin
Daily Mail
12-07-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Inherited Fate by Noemi Orvos-Toth: First born? You're a leader Second child? You have lots of friends Younger sibling? You start revolutions!
Inherited Fate by Noemi Orvos-Toth (Cornerstone Press £18.99, 288pp) The young couple sitting in the psychologist's office were distraught. Their five-year-old had gone from being a cheerful, well-balanced child to one who woke up crying uncontrollably during the night. They were desperate to find out what was making her so distressed. After talking to the parents, the psychologist asked their daughter to draw a picture of her family. The little girl happily drew all the family members, then turned the paper over and sketched out another figure. 'Who is that?' she was asked. 'I don't know, but they're there,' she answered. Her parents were astonished. Yes, they admitted, there had been someone else – a child who had died of leukaemia before the little girl was born. They were so terrified of this tragedy happening again that they never spoke of it, either to their young daughter or to each other. How could she possibly have known about the dead child? Psychologist Noemi Orvos-Toth tells this story to illustrate how our family history, the role we play in the family hierarchy and the secrets we keep from each other have a profound and lasting influence on our lives. In this riveting book she suggests that, to paraphrase Philip Larkin's famous lines, it's not just your mum and dad who mess you up, it's also your ancestors. This concept of 'transgenerational trauma' originated from studies of the children of Holocaust survivors. Even those who were shielded from the knowledge of their parents' or grandparents' suffering 'bore the distant imprints of the horror' in the form of anxiety disorders and depression. She tells a story from her own family to show how 'man hands on misery to man' (Philip Larkin again). Her grandmother lost two babies before she had a healthy child – the author's mother - who 'my grandmother could never love freely and without anxiety'. As a child, Orvos-Toth was always aware that her mother and grandmother were terrified she would get ill, because in her family 'an ordinary household accident or childhood illness immediately projected the horror of death'. Now she finds herself overprotecting her own children in the same way. 'That's how we pass on the torch of fear from generation to generation.' Startlingly, Orvos-Toth maintains that our emotional development begins even before we are born, and that the circumstances of our conception often affect our later behaviour. One of the first questions she asks her clients when they start therapy is whether their parents were in a good relationship at the time of their conception and whether they were looking forward to having a baby. (Figures show that, worldwide, 56 per cent of couples respond to a positive pregnancy test with fear rather than joy.) Growth in the womb is not only physical, she says, since 'the embryo is alert, listening, responding, and above all learning'. If the mother is excitedly looking forward to the birth, the embryo swims in 'happiness hormones'. If she is stressed by the idea of motherhood, this memory is stored in the embryo at a cellular level. A Czech study of babies born in the 1960s showed that children from unwanted pregnancies had difficulty regulating their emotions and controlling their tempers. As adults, they were more likely to become alcoholics and criminals – 'an initial lack of love acts like a thread that runs through our lives and it is difficult to unpick'. Orvos-Toth is particularly interesting on the way your position in the birth order influences the way you develop, which she neatly encapsulates in the phrase: 'no two children grow up in the same family – at least in a psychological sense'. Firstborn children, coddled and fussed over by anxious first-time parents, tend to be leaders rather than innovators, more likely to occupy senior positions and earn more than their younger siblings. More than half of American presidents were the firstborn. Younger children, whose upbringing tends to be more relaxed and slapdash, constantly chafe against the older sibling's power, and are more likely to lead revolutions and come up with innovative concepts. Second children are also keener to seek contacts outside the family and tend to have more friends than eldest siblings. As a second child who has always suspected that my sister never got over my arrival, I especially liked Orvos-Toth's comment that the birth of a sibling 'removes the firstborn from the throne of exclusivity'. At times Inherited Fate reads like a plea for everyone to have some therapy, since 'all our families are full of traumatised ancestors who were maltreated, abandoned, sexually abused, persecuted or expelled'. But fear not: the book does offer a DIY course to improve your mental health. Each chapter ends with an extensive list of questions such as: 'to what extent did you feel loved and accepted in your family?', 'how much did you feel that your parents understood you and sensed your inner world?' and 'how did your family let you know when you had touched on a taboo?' She stresses how bad secrets are both for your psyche and for the family bond. 'Memories we have tried to forget and suppress, fears we have tried to deny, burden our relationships,' she writes. 'It's very rare that distorting the truth can fulfil a protective function, yet we still keep trying.' The more stories children know about their family, even stories going back several generations, the more they will be able to cope with life. After the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers in New York, researchers talked to the children of those who had died. The ones who could talk easily about their family roots recovered faster and suffered less from post-traumatic stress. Family stories, endlessly retold and repeated and embellished, appear to operate like fenders on a boat, protecting us from the worst effects of a collision. Seamlessly translated from Hungarian, Inherited Fate suggests that while we can't undo the past, understanding it can positively influence our present and our future. This enthralling book will make you think more deeply about your own relationships, and the things that have been left unsaid.
Spectator
25-06-2025
- General
- Spectator
The hidden value of notes
'You asshole,' was my friend's cheery greeting when we met in Ludlow. I'd mucked up the time. Reconciled, we walked to his place and on the door was a note he'd left me, scrawled on a card with an image of him mimicking Philip Larkin proudly sitting on a border stone: 'Just a note that you are an asshole. Call.' Stuart, a collector of manuscripts, showed me a recent acquisition, a note by Sir Edward Elgar, graced with a self-portrait featuring, my friend is sure, an immodestly large penis. I think it's his coat tail. We debated the iconography while listening to 'Nimrod'. Notes are often discarded – who hasn't inherited, in the bottom of a trolley, a forlorn shopping list? But they have a long history. Their ephemerality was generally guaranteed on ancient wax tablets, scraped down for reuse. A fair few survive, however, bearing the abandoned sums or grammar of some bored Etruscan child from as long ago as the 7th century bc. An Etch a Sketch is more fun, perhaps, with its erasable text. Ironically, Keats's epitaph, 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water', is inscribed in obdurate stone in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Notes that endure often do so when they are associated with something else of value. Exeter College, Oxford, has a fine scribal manuscript of The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius. Bonus: its owner, Petrarch, has carefully composed his notes in the margins. There is a strong academic interest in 'scholia' – not just annotations in important early texts but layered commentaries on the annotations themselves. If everything has been plumbed in the canonic texts, look to the edges. The hurried informality and often surreptitious nature of a note written on the hoof can tell us much about a particular historical moment. During the first world war it was forbidden to record cabinet discussions. Lewis Harcourt did it all the same, jotting down, under the table, character sketches of Winston Churchill, among others. Notes are not always penned. Printed notices are a form never meant to endure beyond the immediate purpose of laying down some edict or announcing the start or end of a life, but usually flogging something. The Bodleian has the earliest example of print advertising in English. Dating from 1477, Caxton's jobbing piece was intended to gee up enthusiasm for a less than thrilling priest's manual. It promises that the buyer will have a copy 'good chepe'. It's worth a few bob. The note can have a degree of scholarly credibility. The journal Notes and Queries, established in 1849 and dedicated to 'readers and writers, collectors and librarians', is still going strong. Entirely devoid of theoretical nonsense, it invites short observations on, and responses to, points of influence and other marvellously arcane literary niceties. These days we still occasionally scribble stuff down on trusty paper – tomatoes, loo roll, milk, 1 btl Tia Maria, 8 btls wine – but we commit most of our scraps to the digital realm. I am writing this note for Notes On…on the Notes app on my tablet while glancing at my phone for a note from my daughter. Snapchat is the only way I can reach her and she's made sure her laconic observations vanish soon after I have read them. Etruscan kids, modern kids. Plus ça change.
New York Times
30-05-2025
- Health
- New York Times
How the Therapy Generation Chose to Be Childless
They mess you up, your mum and may not mean to, but they fill you with the faults they hadAnd add some extra, just for you. How many times had I read a version of these lines or heard them recited? The opening stanza of Philip Larkin's poem 'This Be the Verse' is a favorite of fictional shrinks and wise folk. I can say them by heart. But it was only last year, my stomach already stretching with new life, that I reread the poem and found myself focusing on the third stanza, which offers the logical conclusion of the earlier two: Man hands misery to deepens like a coastal out as early as you can,And don't have any kids yourself. There are few decisions more fraught for members of my generations — the cusp of millennial and Gen Z — than whether or not to become a parent. In 2023 the U.S. fertility rate fell to a record low. Some of the decline can be explained by a delay in having children or a decrease in the number of children, rather than people forgoing child rearing entirely. But it still seems increasingly likely that millennials will have the highest rate of childlessness of any generational cohort in American history. There are plenty of plausible explanations for the trend. People aren't having kids because it's too expensive. They're not having kids because they can't find the right partner. They're not having kids because they want to prioritize their careers, because of climate change, because the idea of bringing a child onto this broken planet is too depressing. They're swearing off parenthood because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade or because they're perennially commitmentphobic or because popular culture has made motherhood seem so daunting, its burdens so deeply unpleasant, that you have to have a touch of masochism to even consider it. Maybe women, in particular, are having fewer children simply because they can. I suspect there's some truth in all of these explanations. But I think there's another reason, too, one that's often been overlooked. Over the past few decades, Americans have redefined 'harm,' 'abuse,' 'neglect' and 'trauma,' expanding those categories to include emotional and relational struggles that were previously considered unavoidable parts of life. Adult children seem increasingly likely to publicly, even righteously, cut off contact with a parent, sometimes citing emotional, physical or sexual abuse they experienced in childhood and sometimes things like clashing values, parental toxicity or feeling misunderstood or unsupported. This cultural shift has contributed to a new, nearly impossible standard for parenting. Not only must parents provide shelter, food, safety and love, but we, their children, also expect them to get us started on successful careers and even to hold themselves accountable for our mental health and happiness well into our adult years. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
BBC News
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Study highlights poets' 'obsession' with lawnmowers
The university said the study revealed Britain's "poetic obsession" with the lawnmower, which has been used to explore themes such as childhood, violence and addiction. An early example was in 1651 when Andrew Marvell, a satirist and politician, wrote a poem where a scythe accidentally killed a bird as a comment on the English Civil Wars. Ms Gardner's study claims lawnmower poetry reached its highpoint in the last 50 years. In 1979, Philip Larkin described killing a hedgehog with a motorised lawnmower. And in 2007, Andrew Motion, who was poet laureate at the time, based an elegy for his father on memories of him mowing the lawn. Mark Waldron's 2017 poem I Wish I Loved Lawnmowers explored the narrator's addiction to crack cocaine. "British poets are very interested in the lawn as a nostalgic space, so lawnmowers are often associated with childhood memories, especially of fathers working," said Ms Gardner. "The lawn is a safe domestic, often suburban, space in which unexpected violence can occur, as when Larkin kills a hedgehog."
BBC News
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Cambridge study suggests 'poetic obsession' with lawnmowers
Academic research suggests British poets have been writing about mowing the lawn for nearly 375 study, published in Critical Quarterly, argues there is a "lawnmower poetry" tradition that dates back to the 17th Francesca Gardner, from Cambridge University, admitted it "might seem random" to write poetry about mowing."Lawnmowers draw people to poetry as much as poetry draws people to lawnmowers," she said. The university said the study revealed Britain's "poetic obsession" with the lawnmower, which has been used to explore themes such as childhood, violence and early example was in 1651 when Andrew Marvell, a satirist and politician, wrote a poem where a scythe accidentally killed a bird as a comment on the English Civil Gardner's study claims lawnmower poetry reached its highpoint in the last 50 1979, Philip Larkin described killing a hedgehog with a motorised in 2007, Andrew Motion, who was poet laureate at the time, based an elegy for his father on memories of him mowing the Waldron's 2017 poem I Wish I Loved Lawnmowers explored the narrator's addiction to crack cocaine."British poets are very interested in the lawn as a nostalgic space, so lawnmowers are often associated with childhood memories, especially of fathers working," said Ms Gardner. "The lawn is a safe domestic, often suburban, space in which unexpected violence can occur, as when Larkin kills a hedgehog." Follow Cambridgeshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
