Patricia Fara: belief

Transcript context

…In one of your interviews, you said the following. This is a quotation: “For example, when I first finished reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch in my early 20s, I resolved to live by her concluding insight that even unhistoric acts, small ones that seemed within my grasp, could have cumulative beneficial effects.” How has that decision shaped your life? Oh, I still try to abide by that. For example, I was what’s called the senior tutor of a college, which is like a dean in America, I believe. I was responsible for the pastoral well-being and the educational welfare of about 700 students — something like that — each year. The aspect of that work that gave me the most pleasure and most gratification was when a student was in deep distress for some reason or another, and I managed to help that individual student and help them regain their life and get back to work and become a happy student again. I think that’s the sort of thing that George Eliot was talking about — that I had hope that I had a big influence on individual lives. That was the most rewarding aspect of my career. Who first spotted your talent in science?…

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