Crossing to Safety

“But apart from that one invasion, peace, the kind of quiet I used to know on this porch. I remembered the first time we came here, and what we were then, and that brings to mind my age, four years past sixty. Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters, that the books have never come up to what was in my head, and that the rewards—the comfortable income, the public notice, the literary prizes, and the honorary degrees—have been tinsel, not what a grown man should be content with.” 

Larry reflects on his life and settles on themes of content. At this point in the narrative, Larry is 64 years old; he is thinking about how his life and priorities have changed, based upon what he and his family were like in 1937 when the story begins. Larry doesn’t feel he should be content with his life’s work. This view foreshadows how Larry will tell the rest of the story.

“In my experience, the world’s happiest man is a young professor building bookcases, and the world’s most contented couple is composed of that young professor and his wife, in love, employed, at the bottom of a depression which it is impossible to fall further, and entering on their first year as full adults, not preparing any longer but finally into their lives.” 

Larry thinks back to the happiness that he had at the beginning of his professional life, marked by a feeling of arrival and partnership with his wife. He is under the impression that his happiness was built on a feeling that life was finally happening.

“Despite my disillusion with some of my bow-tied colleagues, I was ready in 1937 to believe that the Harvard man was the pinnacle of a certain kind of human development, emancipated by the largeness of his tradition and by the selective processes that had placed him in it from the crudeness of lesser practices.” 

This quote shows both Larry’s former idealism toward his colleagues and the institution of academia at the beginning of his life. It also implies his distance from this view, signaling disillusionment. In this situation, the “Harvard Man” is meant to be larger than life and illustrates how elitism and privilege contributed to Larry’s former idealism toward his profession.