christina61
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Karma: 0 |  | May Sarton on her deceased father's birthday
« Thread Started on Nov 17, 2008, 6:34pm » | |
There was an earlier post about some estrangement between Sarton and her father, so I thought I'd post this where apparently there is no rift.
August 31
It is my father's birthday. I have been thinking of him a lot lately, partly as I draw nearer to his age when he died so suddenly on his way to give a lecture in Montreal. I understand how driven he felt and how tired he was in the last years. All his life he had been climbing an Everest of scholarly endeavor, knowing that he would never reach the top. That would be for others to come, yet he never ceased for a day the enormous effort that work entailed. Always generous in his answers to scholars, always "disponible" when it came to that. From him I learned that impatient patience that drove him on, learned what routine can do, learned not to give up on any day, and also perhaps to go my own way. I think, too, of his beaming smile, so boyish and innocent. I am glad he is not here to see Lebanon torn apart and Beirut destroyed, a city he loved and knew well, as he and my mother spent a year there when he was learning Arabic. He was never dispassionate, never took on the detachment fashionable at Harvard in the thirties. He cared, and it showed in everything he wrote, so Professor L. J. Henderson, who did not care, could call him "sentimental."
At Seventy, A Journal, May Sarton,W.W. Norton & Co., 1984.
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moira
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Karma: 3 | | Re: May Sarton on her deceased father's birthday
« Reply #1 on Nov 25, 2008, 9:04pm » | |
Thanks for posting this, Christina - my father turned 80 a few months back and I'm reminded to actively cherish someone who I'm inclined to take for granted 
xx, moi
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