… grateful students. Colby College excerpts some emails he received from them in his last days. Here’s one:
I remember making a passing comment about [job] worries to you after class one day. Little did I know that, later that day, my dorm room phone would ring and you would be on the other end.
“Kwedor? Bassett here.” (As if that voice could belong to anyone else!) We had been reading The Old Man and the Sea, and … you told me that the message that I should take from that book was simple: do what you want to do, do what makes you happy. Don’t be like Manolin, doing only what makes others happy; he only regretted that decision later.
That was the first time anyone had so bluntly told me that I could control my own fate, that even if my first job after Colby wasn’t glamorous or prestigious, if I was happy then it was a good decision.
January 14th, 2011 at 4:28PM
[…] of it, there are still compensations, and still things for which to strive. And that brings me to a link I found at University Diaries, which tells of Charlie Bassett, an American Lit professor at Colby College. Bassett was dying of […]
January 14th, 2011 at 6:23PM
this is lovely.
January 14th, 2011 at 6:30PM
Rita: Thanks. Yes.
January 14th, 2011 at 11:04PM
This reminds me, for all the differences, of your A Man in Full post after Virginia Tech. There are greats in this strange world we work in, and it’s always good to cherish them.
Thanks.
January 14th, 2011 at 11:30PM
You’re very welcome, Tony.