When Nabokov wrote "Speak Memory" he filled a whole chapter with an account of his education before he came to the point where he felt able to describe the death of his adored, brilliant, and successful father. It was too intense a memory to address directly. Sometimes, too, only metaphors and random memories can express the intensity of the powerful and elemental bond that can exist between fathers and sons.

The memories of tobacco smoke on a father's lapels, the pipe left on a table, the warmth as the child is swept up into his father's arms, and the games played in the evenings before dinner. A boy's world is encompassed by the father as the ultimate hero; the source of strength, comfort and security.

The father sets the standards to live by: the standards of manly behavior, the values of hard work and discipline, the importance of strength, patience, and fortitude, the right way to win or lose; in sum, the art of surviving in the outside world.

As the boy grows and matures over the years, education, intelligent thought, and experience inspire in him a very natural desire to see and question, even doubt, everything that he took for granted in the early years. The father, too, will have undergone his own evolution; from youth and optimism, to maturity and experience. He may have achieved his dream or he may not, but implicit in fatherhood is the hope that he will see his son follow in his footsteps or succeed where he failed.

At the same time, the young man begins to see his father as he is, not a hero, but as a man, with the strengths and weaknesses of a man. He sees the expectations and the hopes his father places in him and he faces a choice: to try to fulfil his father's expectations, or to take his own road.

One of the main signposts of change is when the father accepts that he may not be able to live vicariously through his son; and the son realises with sadness that in being true to himself he will not be the man his father wanted him to be. It can be a rending choice; but every man has the right to choose his own destiny; and every road is the right road because it is freely taken.

The single powerful constant that remains is the bond of love and respect between father and son. It is often left unspoken after the days of childhood pass, but it is present in all the little acts of everyday life: the phone calls, the visits, the letters and family celebrations, and even the quarrels, because all of this is engagement in the most intense sense of the word.

It is a history of two lives, from infancy to maturity to old age, mirrored in each other, and it encompasses a whole memory of family, to be passed on to the children to come.