Fatherhood Quote by Immanuel Velikovsky

"On the day I was born, or possibly on one of the following days, my father went on a walk in the forested hills and thought of a name for me. His first son was called Daniel, and Samuel, in memory of one of his forefathers"

Immanuel Velikovsky, Historian

About this Quote

A name is supposed to feel like destiny; Velikovsky frames his as a footnote with muddy timestamps. "On the day I was born, or possibly on one of the following days" sounds like a shrug at the sacredness of origins, a sly demotion of autobiography from gospel to anecdote. For a historian, that uncertainty is not a mistake but a stance: memory is always already an archive with missing pages.

The father walking alone in "forested hills" reads like a miniature myth of authorship. He withdraws from the household and returns with a name the way prophets come back with tablets. Velikovsky lets the scene hover between pastoral romance and bureaucratic record-keeping, then punctures it with contingency. The name isnomanship is both chosen and oddly impersonal, something retrieved rather than invented.

Then comes the hinge: "His first son was called Daniel, and Samuel in memory of one of his forefathers". The phrase tightens the frame from nature to lineage. Names are revealed as instruments of continuity, a family’s way of writing itself forward. Daniel and Samuel are not just labels but citations, proof that identity is constructed through precedent. That’s also Velikovsky’s lifelong obsession in miniature: the fight over which records count, how tradition shapes what we accept as truth, and how easily the personal becomes an argument about history itself.

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About the Author

Immanuel Velikovsky (June 10, 1895 - November 17, 1979) was a Historian from Belarus.

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