Fathers become traditionalists who think that their way is the only way and their battles the only battles worth fighting. Fathers are tempted to keep their hands on the levers after they have become too feeble to be of much use. Other fathers slip away into a premature obsolescence, a retirement that is nothing more than irresponsibility in golf shoes. Sons think they are the first generation to occupy Earth, ready to correct all their fathers’ mistakes and start everything over again. Fathers are tempted by the decadence of traditionalism; sons become revolutionaries. Fathers pull back; sons pull forward. Together they threaten to rip the family fabric.

Few thinkers have devoted as much attention to these problems as the German-American thinker Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. He focused on the role of speech in maintaining and repairing human relations. When fathers speak, they have to throw a line into the future in the hope that they will continue to influence the world after death. When sons speak, they have to throw a line to the past in an effort to retain and recover what their fathers have done and taught. Fathers have to speak ahead as well as backward; sons must learn to look back, not just forward. Families forge a legacy when both parents and children act against type. Speech forms an intersection of past and future, a shared “present time.” More prosaically, generational gaps can be bridged when parents talk and listen to children, and children listen and talk to their parents. Speech is medicine for healing the wounds of time.