It’s a small booklet and it can appear an easy reading as a consequence: this is not the case. Really.

It’s not a book that I’d recommend to everyone but at the same time I don’t regret to have spent quite some time to read it.
I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on two very important subjects touched and this makes the reading worth the time.

The author elaborates a couple of time on the subject of the difference between the fear of the serf and the fear of the son.
It’s a greater difference than it may appear: the former fears the punishment as he fears the pain or the deprivation associated, the latter fears that the father may send him away.
For the son is the separation from the father that is feared first and foremost, not the possible deprivation and pain that may arise as a consequence of the separation.

A second subject is synthetized by this phrase:
“a planned joy is only a modulation of boredom”
I discussed this with a few friends as I feel it’s deeply true.
From one of them I got a strong bounce back at the first round: he told me that he planned his child and he’s very happy and never bored (sometime upset but this is a different subject) and the same holds true for a number of other things that he plans like going to sky and so on.
We digged deeper together in the idea and it turns out that while he planned to have kids he did not have a way to plan in detail the consequences of the births and the detail how the kids would grow up.
Not that he did not tried to plan, to some degree, as any father would do for the good of the kids themselves, but simply it’s not (thanks God) like programming a computer and the outcome is never known in advance and is not under control.
In the end he agreed that the source of the joy was really in what was not planned, not in the birth event itself, but in the specific, unplanned, face of the kids. And in all the things that they did while growing and that they still do.

I’ve read the book in Italian (title: La ferita della bellezza), but hopefully is available also in english for anyone who dares to try the read.