As I remember him : the biography of R.S / by Hans Zinsser.

  • Hans Zinsser
Date:
1940
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: As I remember him : the biography of R.S / by Hans Zinsser. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    453/466 page 437
    CHAPTER XXVI In which death is met adagio and allegro instead of, as often, maestoso or largo sostenuto R.S. returned from his last professional journey badly dam¬ aged. On the steamer he was humiliated by the fact that not only occasional youngsters but even a British general of approximately his own age could outlast him at deck tennis. Also the sun, instead of tinging his skin a healthy brown, turned him the lemon yellow of the sunburned anaemic. Fie made a tentative diagnosis on himself before arrival in port. So when he got home, he went to see an old friend, a doctor, who had pulled him through a nasty infection a few years before. This friend to whom he had gone was one of those precious individuals whom nature had meant to be physicians. He was fond of R.S. and showed it most helpfully by his affectionate abstinence from any expression of sympathy. And R.S. told me that, together, this good friend and he stood for a long time at the office window, looking out at the Charles River Basin. It was one of Lowell's June days, in the early afternoon. Bright sunshine was reflected from the water and from dozens of little white sails on the dinghies that were racing along the Cambridge shore. The Esplanade was alive with contented men and women, strolling and sitting on the benches; and the sounds of playing children came up through the open window like the voices of many birds. The world looked a bright and attractive place.
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