David Levering Lewis writes in the first half of his biography of W.E.B. Du Bois that the intellectual felt bound by a “covenant with his people to serve them and, if possible, save them from a future as blighted as their past had been sorrowful” and that this covenant distanced him from his wife and daughter. “Zeitgeist prevailed over hearth.” (346) It is a supposition of mine that intellectuals and other people passionately devoted to their work don’t tend to make good parents (this was my justification for why there are almost no good parents in the Bible, which seemed Read more