Question: What does this sentence mean? thanks very much!?

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Answer #1:

''From the vantage of adulthood, and with some retrospective guilt, his son loved him for this grand gesture.''

The son is an adult now so he can think from an 'adult's matured mindset''
The son has some old guilt (maybe he didnt love his dad or wanted to kill him or steal from him or anything similar)
Now the son loved his dad because the dad had done some grand gesture (maybe bequeathed some money or similar...)



really that's what the sentence means..I dont wanna burst my eyes reading the whole paragraph..Please go figure..

Answer #2:

That's some pretty bad writing. Ok, taking a piece at a time, the basic sentence is "son loved him", subject, verb, object. This is not the usual meaning of "love"—it's more active. I can say I love somebody FOR something if they do something that makes me feel love toward them. For example, "She took care of me when I broke my leg, and I loved her for that." That does not mean that I am in love with her. In this case, his son loved him for the "grand gesture" of buying a fabulous car. How that could be is not explained.

But his son loved him for it only afterward, looking back on it "from the vantage of adulthood". A vantage (more often "vantage point") is a place from which you look at something. A better vantage would let you see more, and adulthood let his son see his gesture in a way that made him love him.

His son felt "some retrospective guilt". I can't imagine why, and the paragraph is no help. It means that when his son remembered his father's buying the car, he felt guilty about something. If you want a wild guess, his son had resented the purchase at the time.





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