Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Fitzgerald

There is a modesty in Fitzgerald's phrasing that feels almost like a defensive maneuver: "pushed a little way" makes a life of deep immersion sound like a tentative toe in the water. It's classic scholar-poet understatement, the kind that signals seriousness by refusing to perform it. The line isn't trying to dazzle; it's trying to locate a self.

The key move is the doubling of "keep in touch". First with "myself", then with "this really quite extraordinary language and literature". Fitzgerald implies the two are inseparable. Language isn't a subject he studies; it's a medium he uses to remain intact. For a translator and classicist best known for rendering Homer into modern English, that makes pointed sense: translation is a daily negotiation between fidelity and reinvention, between the voice you inherit and the voice you can honestly speak. Staying "in touch" suggests the constant risk of losing contact, of becoming either too academic (language as museum) or too unmoored (self as improvisation).

"Extraordinary" arrives softened by "really quite", another hedge that reads as discipline: wonder, but controlled wonder. Fitzgerald is signaling reverence without sanctimony, awe without salesmanship. Contextually, this sounds like an older writer reflecting on how classical languages functioned as a private lifeline amid modern pressures and public work. The subtext: the classics weren't an escape from the present; they were a way to meet it with a steadier instrument panel, tuned by centuries of syntax, music, and human predicament.