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Praise for Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!:
“Exquisitely sensitive … Notable for [its] piercing emotional honesty … A hopeful book, one that beautifully charts K's evolution from a man ashamed of his son to one capable of celebrating the boy's unusual but complex humanity.”
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As I copy the above passage I notice that I was being dishonest in my speech. According to what I was saying there, I am at work on a book of definitions of the world, society, and mankind for my own son and his comrades in the special class for handicapped children. The constitution will be central to my theme. But the current reality under the constitution makes writing about it in concise, accurate, evocative language impossible. I am not suggesting even now that this is altogether contrary to the truth. Nevertheless, to be honest about it, the crux of the problem was not so much on the outside as internal to me. To put it more courageously, it was my laziness. To be sure, lurking behind my laziness was a sense of futility tinged with fear that had its own source in my misgivings about my talent. I had conceived this idea even before my son entered school. I began writing it for a child who had scarcely been out of his house, and as my son went to elementary school and then entered the special section for handicapped students at the middle school, gradually adjusting my style I created drafts for each stage of his life. Now I was writing for a young man about to enter the second year of the high school program at the special school, and the only solid definition I had provided him with so far was for foot, “nice foot,” and I had only managed that thanks to an attack of gout.
When I came down with gout I was ruled entirely by the fiery red swelling at the base of my left big toe: as even the weight of a sheet was unbearably painful I lay in bed at night uncovered—sleeping only a little without the help of whisky—and sprawled on the sofa in the same state during the day, crawling to the bathroom with one leg in the air. At the time, Eeyore had just entered the special class at middle school, and, watching his father, who dwarfed him in height and weight, reduced to helplessness for days on end, made a deep impression. He did his very best to be useful to me. As I crawled down the hall obliged to learn how painful a shin bone could be, he would scamper after me like a sheep dog in pursuit of a stray sheep and more than once, tripping over his own chubby, clumsy body, would fall on my gout-ridden foot. I couldn't help screaming aloud, but the way he withered right before my eyes at my suffering was enough to fill me with a phantom doubt that perhaps I was a savage father who beat his son. And that thought incised itself into me like a wound. As the attacks gradually subsided, my son would stroke the rose-colored swelling at the base of my toe with slightly bent fingers—supporting himself with his other hand to keep from leaning his weight on me—and would speak aloud, addressing my foot, “Nice foot, are you all right, what a very nice foot you are!”
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