I was able to borrow the book from my library with no wait. I would like to read one of his fiction books sometime. I especially liked Chapter 6, Poems, and the passage quoted below. Father and son relationships are a complicated mystery to me as a wife/sister/daughter, especially watching the lingering and haunting effects once the father has passed on. I thought "ghostly presence of their hand" was an interesting expression. I observe it in both my husband and my brother who are mature adults, even though their relationships with their fathers were in some ways the same and in many ways different.
Quote:
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And the father must have known, having once themselves been sons, that the ghostly presence of their hand will remain through the years, to the end of time, and that no matter what burdens are laid on that shoulder or the number of kisses a lover plants there, perhaps knowingly driven by the secret wish to erase the claim of another, the shoulder will remain forever faithful, remembering that good man's hand that had ushered them into the world. To be a man is to be part of this chain of gratitude and remembering of blame and forgetting, or surrender and rebellion, until a son's gaze is made so wounded and keen that, on looking back, he sees nothing but shadows.
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