Page 55 - Gullivers

look at the issue from my point of view: look at the provocation I endured.
By the time I was nine or ten – long before his voyages brought him fame -
I had grown weary of hearing what an accomplished musician Lemuel Gulliver had been as a child. How melodiously he played the spinet; what a mechanical genius he had always possessed; how he had been so fine and scholarly a fellow that he was sent to Emmanuel College in Cambridge when he was a mere fourteen. Secretly, I shuddered with anxiety when I remembered that the fates failed to reward him for his good behaviour or his devotion to his studies.
‘Did I wallow in self-pity?’ he used to ask rhetorically and with cold self-pity, when he’d remind us how he was plucked from the haven of Cambridge and ignominiously apprenticed to a surgeon. He would bitterly rage on the destiny of third sons such as himself, who came from families with sins and sons more numerous than fortunes. On my more expansive days, I imagined how miserable that must have been for a youth so governed by reason as he was. Later, when
I had occasion and leisure to ponder these things, I wondered whether the exposure at so tender an age to disease, to lumps of deformity, to the stench of human innards and to the decay of dying lest an indelible mark on the studious, rather prim youth. (I fancy Father was a prim youth, inclined to know too much for others to enjoy his company, and out of sympathy with humans even then.) Mostly, however, I used to stiffen with resentment and silently accuse him of visiting on Betty and myself the misery he himself suffered as a youth.
As time passed, I became a gangly youth and my blood boiled more easily and rapidly. Those’s how it is with young fellows, of course; but, believe me,
I suffered unique provocation. Can you imagine the humiliation I suffered on realising that I was pitied by schoolmasters who ‘made allowances’ for certain boys with absent fathers, and who included me in the category? Father once accused me of being smitten with pride, and maybe I am. How osten I clenched my lips to stop myself lashing out against being pitied. Little did I realise that worse ignominy than that was to come.
III. Lemuel Gulliver’s Children 49