A father berates his young son harshly in public on a ferry, screaming insults and accusations at him for spilling coffee. Other passengers watch silently as the boy stands frozen by his father's words. When the narrator tries to comfort the boy by saying spilling coffee happens, the boy hisses violently at her to shut up, wrapping himself and his father in a shield of hate to protect their humiliation and pain.
A father berates his young son harshly in public on a ferry, screaming insults and accusations at him for spilling coffee. Other passengers watch silently as the boy stands frozen by his father's words. When the narrator tries to comfort the boy by saying spilling coffee happens, the boy hisses violently at her to shut up, wrapping himself and his father in a shield of hate to protect their humiliation and pain.
A father berates his young son harshly in public on a ferry, screaming insults and accusations at him for spilling coffee. Other passengers watch silently as the boy stands frozen by his father's words. When the narrator tries to comfort the boy by saying spilling coffee happens, the boy hisses violently at her to shut up, wrapping himself and his father in a shield of hate to protect their humiliation and pain.
a father at the snack counter low in the boat gets breakfast for the others. Here, let me drink some of Mom’s coffee, so it won’t be so full for you to carry, he says to his son, a boy of ten or eleven. The boat lies lower and lower in the water as the last cars drive on, it tilts its massive grey floor like the flat world. Then the screaming starts, I carry four things, and I only give you one, and you drop it, what are you, a baby? a high, male shrieking, and it doesn’t stop, Are you two? Are you a baby? I give you one thing, no one in the room seems to move for a second, a steaming pool spreading on the floor, little sea with its own waves, the boy at the shore of it. Can’t you do anything right? Are you two? Are you two?, the piercing cry of the father. Go away, go up to your mother, get out of here— the purser swabbing the floor, the boy not moving from where the first word touched him, and I could not quite walk past him, I paused and said I spilled my coffee on the deck, last trip, it happens to us all. He turned to me, his lips everted so the gums gleamed, he hissed a guttural hiss, and in a voice like Gollum’s or the Exorcist girl’s when she made the stream of vomit and beamed it eight feet straight into the minister’s mouth he said Shut up, shut up, shut up, as if protecting his father, peeling from himself a thin wing of hate, and wrapping it tightly around father and son, shielding them.
The Book of Joy - Summarized for Busy People: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World: Based on the Book by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Carlton Abrams