Holy Nights of Obligation

Are stargazing dads the new soccer moms?

Earlier in the year Mark Oppenheimer (more on his work soon) set going an involved and acrimonious online discussion with a piece in the New Republic challenging the idea that children benefit from parent-enforced regimens of music lessons and the like.

Already the question of the benefits of time-intensive striving for excellence – which looms large in the lives of so many of us who are parents – had been sharpened to a knifepoint through Malcolm Gladwell’s so-called ten-thousand-hour rule and through articles like the one by the pianist Jeremy Denk telling of the human costs of virtuosity.

Mark is now circulating a message among his acquaintances asking just how much our elementary-school education made a difference in our lives (as if we are the people in a position to say). But I am stuck on his first piece, which opens onto a related question: how hard should we try to share our passions with our children, when they are themselves less than passionate about them – and they make their feelings known?

Eleanor Catton has an answer of sorts in the Times. A profile of her tells of her father, “a philosophy professor who used to roust her and her two siblings out of bed to admire the night sky.”

“Stars were a big part of my childhood,” she said. “My dad would be almost weeping, overcome with emotion at this extraordinary celestial object, and we’d just be feeling cold.”

Just cold: and yet Catton, now twenty-eight, recently won the Booker Prize for her novel The Luminaries, whose nearly 900 pages are organized “according to the astrological signs of its characters and the position and movements of the planets above nineteeth-century New Zealand.

Obviously she caught something of her father’s passion on those starry nights.

(Starry sky above Death Valley is from Wikimedia Commons.)

• 20 November 2013