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“Once you decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and everything you have previously enjoyed about them, everything you have previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear.”
After he decides to adopt Jude, in Part II, Chapter 2, Harold thinks about what it means to be a parent and defines the primary emotion as fear. Harold suggests that part of being a parent is constantly fearing that one’s child could be in pain or danger. This fear demands a constant vigilance that parents cannot escape. Although experiencing the death of a child is all but unbearable, one small positive thing is that the parent no longer has to feel the fear of their child being hurt.
“Much of his friendship with Jude, it often seemed, was not letting himself ask the questions he knew he ought to, because he was afraid of the answers.”
In Part I, Chapter 3, Willem introduces the question that haunts him and all of Jude’s friends: Why didn’t we do more? The answer seems simple: Jude would not let them. He made their friendship conditional on this basis, deflecting attention from himself and refusing to answer the most basic questions about his past. But here, Willem acknowledges the harder truth, which is that he was afraid. Willem’s early life might have been difficult, but he is not driven to cut himself, and he does not want to know what could have happened to Jude that would motivate this impulse. So Willem, like Harold and Andy and Malcolm and Jude, simply ignore the obvious
“[T]he only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are […] and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself […] and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all.”
In this vignette, found in Part II, Chapter 3, Jude tells his pupil Felix how to find friends, a task at which Jude is unexpectedly quite successful. Jude reveals his own biggest struggle with relationships when he acknowledges that trusting is challenging for him. For Jude, it remains a goal, and usually an elusive one. He certainly wants to trust his friends, and he knows that they have earned his trust. Nevertheless, he believes himself unworthy of their trust, thinking that he did something fundamentally wrong to cause people to abuse him, so if he tells others what happened to him, Jude thinks, they might see the bad person he believes himself to be and reject him. Jude cannot imagine that his friends might open a new possibility for him.
