Well, you can’t begin to write anything until you’ve read everything. It was a sentence I found strangely exciting, with its promise of scholarly rigor and difficulty; I felt that if I devoted myself to a career whose training was painful, my father might approve of it. As she spoke I looked around her office: the wooden shelves neatly lined with books in Greek and Latin and French and German and Italian and English, the heavy plaster bust of an unsmiling Athena on top of one tall bookcase, a touch of humor provided by the many images and figurines of owls, Athena’s bird, which Jenny loved.
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