Literature

My father was a literature major (Dartmouth, 1923). I inherited his love of the classics and made my way through a fair number. Some were terrific, others not so much. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick has remained a mainstay for me, a work I return to from time to time. Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim … not a favorite … save for one sentence, near the book’s end, an instruction to Jim from his father, a churchman, that Jim should, “Trust Providence as the established order of the universe.” Those words come to me, from time to time, as if from my own father.

Lord Jim book cover from Wikimedia