Terry Eagleton, writing in COMMONWEAL:

“The scholarship boy typically feels that he has betrayed his parents, not that he has done away with them. Was I glad that my father was dead, as well as distraught? Was his end necessary so that I might begin? When I became a don I was the youngest fellow of my college since the eighteenth century, an era to which some of my colleagues seemed anxious to return. I had set my foot on the escalator that was to bear me up and away from the speechless man I had left on his deathbed. Then I moved to Oxford, uncertain whether I should reject the place in my father’s name or embrace it for just the same reason.”

I’ve not kept up with Eagleton’s books these past years, but I’ll be reading A DEATH OF ONE’S OWN.