For Brexit to leave with cash in his pocket the family estate would have had to be liquidated. A nightmare these days since the house would need to be sold. Did Palestinians then own their houses? Dunno. I'm more inclined to think it involved disposing of a flock of sheep and goats.
The division was into halves not thirds which was lousy for the father. In effect, the proposal involved bringing the future back into the present; in the future the father would be dead.
It is either said outright or implied that Brexit "wasted his substance in riotous living". I see wine (and shudder at its probable taste) and I see a red-light district (encore shudder). Would they be enough to ruin him? Ah yes, there's gambling, that would do it.
When Brexit returns, all tuckered out (Did disease play a part?), Remain quite justifiably complains. Dad talks about a son that was once dead and is now alive. Parental forgiveness outweighs legal fiddle-faddle. But did it work out? My worry is that Remain might not even trust his father again, let alone his ne'er-do-well brother.
The lessons are obvious. But here's another. A sub-text suggests Brexit was bored with his agrarian life amd set out to debauch himself. He achieved that but I doubt it was much fun. Debauchery is only enjoyable when it's incidental. And now a never-ending life of toil stretches beyond the horizon.
This is really good. I don't think Remain will trust human nature again, but perhaps he will be wiser for it. Forewarned is forearmed.
ReplyDeleteColette: As a small youth I was condemned to attend church services of various persuasions. To those seemingly rhetorical questions that were offered (especially during sermons) I often found different - even contrarian - answers.
ReplyDeleteSo where's the mother in all this?
ReplyDeleteSabine: I asked myself the same question. But, as I said, I was working from a 75-year-old memory some of which was quite sharp (Father says to Remain: "For this your brother was lost and is found, was dead and is now alive again.") and I wanted to pretend this was a sort of conversational piece where no one had access to a smartphone. As Sellars and Yeatman said in their hilarious take on British history "1066 and all that" - history "comprises all the parts you can remember including 103 good things, 5 bad kings and 2 genuine dates". Published in 1930 (three years before I was born) and still in print I believe. If you ever felt tempted to laugh at the Brits - and let's face it, now's an excellent time - this slender volume provides ample ammunition.
ReplyDeleteNow you need to do the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin...
ReplyDeleteOf course, the father says to the elder son quite clearly that everything he has is also his.
Marly: I am not necessarily drawn to biblical parables unless they raised questions in the ignoramus I was at the time, as I endured church services and Sunday School. The Prodigal Son is unusual in that the main question - the necessity of selling the house - came much later, probably triggered by the ordeal of buying my first house. This itself was comparatively late by British standards, I was 37.
ReplyDeleteAs a child I was deeply disturbed by the horrific events of the Old Testament: the fact that Samson's eyes were put out left me mentally cowering. I must have been slightly older when I first heard about the woman (name now unknown) hammering a tent peg into head of the sleeping chap (name also now unknown); old enough to see this as a clever way of getting round the disparity between their relative strengths.
Perhaps the most horrific event of all was the death that didn't happen - when Abraham (or was it Moses?) was commanded to kill his own son. With a knife - that was the point. My feverish imagination dwelt on those moments of terrible sensation the son would have undergone, for I was, knowingly, a son myself. The fact that the command was withdrawn meant nothing; the earlier horrors were far too vivid. As a result the New Testament ended - in my circumscribed opinion - with more of the same.
When I finally came upon LP Hartley's wise and memorable words - decades later - they helped compartmentalise those childish worries, even though I can still be touched when I hear of a murder - by an individual or a state, it doesn't matter - where it seems the act of killing isn't enough, that there are those who feel it should be enhanced by extra torment.