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| Grandpa as a sea cadet. (Digby, Nova Scotia, 1944.) |
Grandpa (a long-time engineer for CN) died a few years ago, and Grandma is in a nursing home now, so we're preparing to sell their empty house. At present, we're boxing Grandpa's sizable library. And what things I've found! Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Erasmus, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Nietzsche, James, Russell, Freud, Jung, Köhler, Einstein, Sartre, Barth,
et al — most underlined and annotated — as well as some (bad) single-volume histories of philosophy. Why, there's even an Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology textbook, written by some Jesuit scholar. It's also annotated.
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| (Yarmouth, N.S., 1950.) |
He seems to have sipped willy-nilly from almost every major thinker, without ever drinking deep. (Leastwise there's but a single book per writer.) Yet he never spoke of his readings, not to me anyhow. And I thought he'd nothing but the standard old-man books (about steam engines, military history, decorative gardening, Canadiana). Too bad. We might've had some good talks.
"There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with. I shall send you, accordingly, the actual books themselves, and to save you a lot of trouble hunting all over the place for passages likely to be of use to you, I shall mark the passages so that you can turn straight away to the words I approve and admire." --Seneca's VI letter to Lucilius--
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