Host and Guest “Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.” Evelyn Waugh Consider those couples in seagoing mail days when letters were read after a hundred things more recent had happened and emotions had changed, giving the words as much currency as a headline in a hurricane, and yet those explorer/home fires bonds thrived on the prospect of deliberate absence, planned for and even welcomed as a test of love. It’s my fantasy, born of having hardly been his on-site parent, that they’re a positive precedent for proving oneself steadfast by pursuing the relationship as a kind of thought experiment, like a room standing in for a mind standing in for a home.
- Michael Milburn
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