Family man …

… Philip Larkin: Letters Home 1936-1977 – review | London Evening Standard.

Eva Larkin emerges as exasperating: timid, tiresome, and dependent, incapable of being on her own or managing life competently, a constant bother. 

In one letter Larkin actually goes so far as to offer his depressed mother some eloquent life-advice: “Do not worry about the past: it is, after all, past, and fades daily in our memory & in the memories of everyone else. Further, it can’t touch the future unless we let it. Every day comes to us like a newly cellophaned present, a chance for an entirely fresh start… We are silly if we do not amble easily in the sun while we can, before time elbows us into everlasting night & frost.”