The illusion of freedom: My brother at 75

The continuity girls - and there
were more than a few in his case
- performing the function of our
search engines, today, remind me
that at this page, this date has
often yielded to my reminiscence
of the moment of my one sibling.

I did not know him, for the full
25 years, coming into his life a
while after him, in the guise of
an intriguing but not altogether
necessary presence; and I wasn't
there, as it ended. In the fifty
more recent years, however, this
person has sustained that categ-
orically exceptional position of
being the single mysterious gift
to my existence, to the extent I
believe must be familiar to many
siblings in a family of four. As
such I do 'return,' if that com-
monoplace term can be used, into
his existence in mine so custom-
arily, that the challenge of his
birthday is not to summarize it,
but to identify the terms of its
effect. This is always advisory,
not a prescription, but a tenta-
tive deduction from his example.

              Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.

              It doesn't so much matter what you do in

              particular so long as you have your life.

              If you haven't had that what have you had?

              I'm too old - too old at any rate for what

              I see. What one loses one loses; make no

              mistake about that. Still, we have the il-

              lusion of freedom; therefore don't, like

              me today, be without the memory of that il-

              lusion. I was either, at the right time,

              too stupid or too intelligent to have it,

              and now I'm a case of reaction against the

              mistake. Do what you like so long as you

              don't make it. For it was a mistake. Live.




From his example, not from these
terms or punctuation, one should
derive the profile of a benefic-
iary of this frame of reference,
in my brother. I never knew well
a more stark examplar of the il-
lusion of freedom, and up to the
point of his turning toward that
loss he incurred, knew him well.

Nothing can exceed the closeness
with which the whole fits again
into its germ, James observed, as
he identified the foregoing exhor-
tation as the subject of his fav-
orite among his novels. It is a
story, as experience of this au-
thor steels one to suppose, which
will not leave its hull until it
is anatomized, exhausted of dichotomies and paradoxes, and simply laid there, for memory. 

The illusion of freedom in The Am-bassadors is merrily imperiled 
(and not) by a chronic symptom in James, an impressionability in Americans, or in the argot of our time, the seduction of boys. The germ encapsulates, reproduces, both elements, rivals. He knew.

Henry James
The Art of the Novel
  Preface to The Am-
  bassadors
1909
Charles Scribner & Sons
1934
University of Chicago©
2011