Imagine My Surprise

A few days ago I finally picked up a novel given by a friend years ago, The Go-Between by LP Hartley. The book rather mysteriously unfolds as the author sorts through boxes of old memorabilia.  We learn *something* happened when he was a boy that has determined the course of his life, without yet an inkling of what the event was.

Here's what he says on page 16 as his memories of the event slowly unfold:

Should I have acquitted myself better, with the knowledge I had now? I doubted it; knowledge may be power, but it is not resilience, or resourcefulness, or adaptability to life, still less is it instinctive sympathy with human nature; and those were qualities I possessed in 1900 in far greater measure than I possess them in 1952.

I was thrilled and excited to see Neufeld's very vocabulary about the power of grieving the disappointments and losses of life in this sentence, written in 1953.