A very personal note For the past couple weeks I’ve been staying at my father and stepmother’s house: Pop is at the end of his life, and while he celebrated his 84th birthday last week, I’ll probably only be here a couple more days. Four years ago Pop was first diagnosed with cancer, and when it came back he decided that buying more time with aggressive treatment, but spending more of it in hospitals dealing with the side effects, felt like a losing proposition. At that point, he moved down to his library so he could spend his last days with my stepmother, and to be close to his books and notes. Fifty years earlier he had embarked on a life as a history professor (a vocation I studied for myself), and the space is filled with dozens of neatly-arranged binders from monographs and other academic projects, hundreds of notebooks from archival trips and fieldwork, a dazzling collection of fountain pens and mystifyingly large number of disposable pens, and thousands of books. Poking around it one night, I realized that the library’s layers grew outward around him. Closest to his desk were notes and papers for a book on post-World War II Allied planning in south Asia, a project he worked on even when the cancer came back. Further away, on shelves stacked two rows deep, were books and papers from earlier books; buried behind those, like the cosmic background radiation of the Big Bang, were his books from graduate school.
This week in the future of work
This week in the future of work
This week in the future of work
A very personal note For the past couple weeks I’ve been staying at my father and stepmother’s house: Pop is at the end of his life, and while he celebrated his 84th birthday last week, I’ll probably only be here a couple more days. Four years ago Pop was first diagnosed with cancer, and when it came back he decided that buying more time with aggressive treatment, but spending more of it in hospitals dealing with the side effects, felt like a losing proposition. At that point, he moved down to his library so he could spend his last days with my stepmother, and to be close to his books and notes. Fifty years earlier he had embarked on a life as a history professor (a vocation I studied for myself), and the space is filled with dozens of neatly-arranged binders from monographs and other academic projects, hundreds of notebooks from archival trips and fieldwork, a dazzling collection of fountain pens and mystifyingly large number of disposable pens, and thousands of books. Poking around it one night, I realized that the library’s layers grew outward around him. Closest to his desk were notes and papers for a book on post-World War II Allied planning in south Asia, a project he worked on even when the cancer came back. Further away, on shelves stacked two rows deep, were books and papers from earlier books; buried behind those, like the cosmic background radiation of the Big Bang, were his books from graduate school.