Watersprings

Howard Kennedy has spent his life among Greek texts and Cambridge courtyards, a classical lecturer who has observed human nature with precision but kept himself carefully at a distance. At fifty, he possesses the credentials of a distinguished academic career, yet something troubles him: he suspects he has read about life rather than lived it. When Jack Sandys arrives in his lectures careless, radiant, and utterly unburdened by intellectual self-consciousness Howard recognizes something he had forgotten existed. Through this young student, and through his eccentric colleague Mr. Redmayne, Howard begins to question whether contentment is simply another word for withdrawal. Watersprings is a novel about awakening the slow, sometimes painful recognition that a life spent in the company of great minds is not the same as a life fully lived. Set in the early twentieth century at fictional Beaufort College, this is a meditation on what it means to grow older, to confront one's own emotional absence, and to wonder if it is ever too late to stop merely watching life and start participating in it.