Gilbert Murray

Karsh, Yousuf, 1908-2002 · 1955

A bright English morning in 1955 found me on the road to Oxford, but I went with a feeling of private trepidation. How did one approach a man said to be perhaps the most scholarly of our age? ~ I found him in the perfect scholar's setting. His beautiful library was flooded with golden sunlight and, of course, with the aura of Oxford's past. The man himself was also warm and sunny, but he spoke little. As in all great men of my acquaintance, simplicity seemed to be his dominant quality. I noted a typewriter of antique design in a corner where, no doubt, his works of scholarship were produced. And on the floor beneath his table there was a crude electrical heater against the winter chill of England. Though not an Englishman by birth (he was born in Australia), he has taken to the ways of England and was almost a fixture in Oxford as its buildings. ~ At that moment he was busy with a speech to be delivered at the celebration of his ninetieth birthday. I could see that it was no time for prolonged conversation and, besides, I was not equipped to meet him on his own ground of learning in a sanctuary where learning has flourished for so long. I asked him but one question: What was the secret on his longevity? The aged man gave me a brisk, businesslike reply: 'Keep mentally occupied and, I would like to think, an inner serenity.' This man mind had been fully occupied for nearly a century, he was still busy, and in a chaotic age he was utterly serene. I left him with a new serenity of my own (Karsh, 1959).