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It is not good for man to be alone | Katie van Schaijik
In Spain without much access to the internet, I’ve been reading the books on my son’s AP English summer reading list. It feels like it’s been a long time since I’ve read real literature.
There were two by Tobias Wolff, whose work I’d never come across before. In Pharaoh’s Army and Old School. I especially loved the latter, which was tender and touching and honest and insightful.
I marked this passage for our catalogue of great personalist insights.
“Arch” is the first name of Dean Makepeace, who had resigned his long-standing position at a prestigious boys’ prep school and now found himself adrift in the world.
In former times Arch had supposed that his sense of being a distinctive and valuable man proceeded from his own qualities, and that they would sustain him in that confidence wherever he happened to be. He’d never imagined that this surety was conferred on him by others, by their knowing and cherishing him. But so it was. Unrecognized, he had become a ghost, even to himself.
He distilled no general rule from this understanding. Maybe a man of lordly self-conviction and detachment could forsake the place that knew him and not become a ghost. Arch could say only that he was not that man. He was attached. How could he have thought that he was free to leave his school?
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