小编注:什么叫做non-crying cry?这是男人们专有的一种哭泣方式。也许在婚礼上,女儿和妈妈可以互相抹去眼泪,但是爸爸只能一个人默默回到自己的房间,默默去想念,因为男人是不允许在大庭广众下轻易掉眼泪的。这也是为什么一个父亲会教自己的儿子,如何学会non-crying cry。大家有没有觉得,
父亲节或者老爸的生日那天,不管你花多少心思,都难得看到老爸像老妈那样大动感情呢?其实,他只是用另一种方式,流下了作为男人和父亲的眼泪。
Real men don't cry. We just get something in our eye
A short walk from my house in Hampshire, on a hill overlooking the heathland, is a plaque marking the spot where Richard Pryce Jones
deliberately crashed his Halifax
bomber during the war. He could have parachuted to safety, but that would have meant crashing into the village. The
epitaph reads: "He died that others might live."
It never fails to move me. Not to tears, you understand. That would be disrespectful. But I do usually manage a lump in the
throat and that film of
moisture over the eyes that men have in their
emotional armoury. Gordon Brown demonstrated the non-crying cry
beautifully when he made his
farewell speech on the steps of Number 10. That catch in the throat. The
determination not to weep in public. At that moment, if at no other, he had nobility。
Not
everyone can carry it off. I don't think Paul Gascoigne ever quite got the hang of it, for example. But I like to think I have it down to an art, my
technique honed
from years of watching The Railway Children, Sleepless in Seattle and that scene in Dumbo when the mother
elephant is locked away. "Daddy!" my sons will say, pointing the accusing finger. "You're crying!"
"Me? Over Dumbo? Ha ha ha. No, boys, what I am doing is man-crying, a sort of non-crying cry. I'll teach you it one day. Very useful."
They are too young to
appreciate the nuance yet, but when they are older I will explain that open sobbing is associated with being female, and so inappropriate
for men. The Charlie Chaplin
analogy might be useful here. He once said that the way to act drunk is to imagine yourself a drunk man
trying to act sober. The same is true when a man learns the non-crying cry. To be convincing, you must look as if you are
trying to avoid tears。
In this respect, it is important for a young man to
appreciate the difference between male tears and female. I remember once asking the
actress Emilia Fox if she could cry at will, right there and then, over lunch. To my astonishment, she could - from a
standing start. Fat tears rolling down her cheeks. When she had finished, she resumed her smiling countenance。
Those are
female tears, and the reason you never hear anyone say: "It's enough to make a grown woman cry." That expression only works when it refers to "grown men" and though that may seem tautological, the "grown" is justified. Not all men are grown. The emotionally incontinent exhibitionists who cry when they are kicked off
talent shows such as The X Factor are not grown men, for example. Men have to be careful what they cry at, because some subjects are more
worthy of tears than others. Grief, obviously. But not self-pity. And
rarely should a man cry in pain. And never at the death of a
princess he didn't know. Those are the rules。
I
suspect my
colleague Matt Pritchett might be with me on this. One of his cartoons this past week showed a father next to a television tuned to the World Cup, explaining to his children that "at some point in the next few weeks, you are going to see me cry". And the day after the last
survivor of the Great Escape died, he did a
cartoon showing a gravestone with a mound
of tunnelled earth trailing away from it. I seemed to have something in my eye when I saw that, and I expect he had the same something in his eye when he drew it。