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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=460158" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>My father's Plato</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">And that’s not a claim to paternity –<br>it’s the possessive case; though to what degree<br>my father possessed Plato, or Plato, him, <br>remains one of those unsolved mysteries<br>stored in that little room of sadness in the hearts<br>of children of that more formal, distanced age…</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Like so many self-made men, he’d never read<br>a novel before he retired; and then<br>set out to educate himself<br>as would befit the father of a son<br>he planned – God unwilling, at first – to have, <br>whom he would provide with all the advantages<br>he’d never had… alas; alas for both of us…</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He’d read of course, Smiles’ ‘Self-Help’ – they all had; <br>moved on to Carlyle, Ruskin (briefly) , Emerson; wrote<br>in warm approval to George Bernard Shaw, <br>who responded with one of his printed pre-texted postcards…<br>then worked through those nicely-bound<br>sets of Hardy, Galsworthy, Dickens, Scott, and H.G.Wells, <br>offered cheaply by the Daily Mail or by Wills’ Cigarettes…</div><div style="margin:10px 0">then – Plato; or at least, his Republic; <br>a yellow bound, standard Everyman; but this one<br>- I discovered far too late in life -<br>fiercely underlined in summary pencil lines…</div><div style="margin:10px 0">and that was really, all he needed; busy<br>with his hens and chicks, his toddler son (at last…) : <br>later, novels of another sort crept up on him; he lived<br>a – no, don’t call it fantasy – a parallel life<br>in volume after volume of those yellow-covered<br>Wild West Club. (That’s where he would have flourished, <br>aggressive boss of bosses, if he had not been stone-deaf…) </div><div style="margin:10px 0">So what was he to Plato, or Plato said to him? <br>Are the underlinings an extension of that angry, abrupt man<br>meaning, that’s my experience; so he’s right…; <br>or was there stunned admiration; or<br>was there a humility I never saw<br>until efficiency turned to eccentricity, <br>eccentricity to dementia…<br>a humility, perhaps, that took him to another world<br>of ancient Greece, and glories, virtues, and ideals, <br>where Spartans from the wild wild East<br>rode roughshod over democracy, and<br>where a good man must be sought, <br>to run them out of town…? </div><div style="margin:10px 0">One day, I’ll have to face the mist of tears, <br>read those fierce underlinings made<br>as if by the muzzle of a Colt<br>guarding civilisation by the gully and the scrub, <br>the horses tethered, (Indians, always the third estate) : <br>seek in the underlinings to immortal thought, <br>the man I loved but never knew.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Michael+Shepherd">Michael Shepherd</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=460158" data-title="My father's Plato de Michael Shepherd" data-description="And that’s not a claim to paternity –
it’s the possessive case; though to what degree
my father possessed Plato, or Plato, him, 
remains one of those unsolved mysteries
stored in that little room of sadness in the hearts
of children of that ..."></div>
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