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18. Living Option
- University of Nebraska Press
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)&+ '. Living Option _jmWiWi_\ jmeb_]^jd_d]Xebji had torn through Alice. Who was she after years of immersion in the James clan? William had demanded far more of her than Henry had. She collaborated in his life and work, steadying him so that he could work productively and providing constant emotional and intellectual companionship. Pragmatism, which became literally a household word, has again been taken up by some professional philosophers as a subject for study, and William’s work on radical empiricism, never finished and never completely assimilated, raises questions concerning the relationship between the knower and the known that are still debated in epistemological studies.1 Henry was who he was: a sensitive man, a great writer, someone with many friends, a man who loved any number of young men passionately, but a lonely man, one who needed Alice so much at the end that her presence was a healing balm. He gave her his books, and he loved her children, yet he too made demands. She cared for him selflessly in '/'& and '/'' and then again in '/',. Less than two years before she died Alice reflected on her life with William and Henry. She thought of what she had done and what she should have done not for herself but for them. She confessed her thoughts to her oldest friend, Katharine Hooker: )&, b_l_d]efj_ed Perhaps some of our failures had to be, and out of failure is born for some of us mercy, pity, sympathy and what Swedenborg would call the knowledge of, and longing to extinguish our “selfhood.” . . . You say truly that no second chance, no new beginning can let us do for those we love, what once we might have done—and didn’t—but what if our failure was of deeper value to them? I am saying these things to you as I say them to myself—“Accept, renounce and keep a good word to the future.”2 She had learned the same thing from a Japanese shopkeeper in San Francisco who once told Alice he had attained Nirvana. She was struck by his worn patience and deep faith. When she told the man that Nirvana equaled pessimism, he informed her, “The nirvana we strive for is the extinction of self.”3 At times Alice had nearly extinguished herself during her years of caring for others: her union with the Jameses proved to be no basement bargain. The dreams Alice had for her four children were not fully realized , perhaps because there was no way to re-create the extraordinary circumstances and the convoluted family dynamics that led to William’s and Henry’s achievements, but they became her dearest friends at the end of her life. But despite all she had given to the Jameses, the Gibbenses, and her children, something of her own subjectivity remained. The selfnarrative she had created as a child remained alive as now she reenvisioned herself as a moral reformer. In her old age Alice participated in the same kinds of causes that had captured her imagination as a child. In spite of her feelings of grief and inadequacy (or perhaps because of them) her horizons widened. The determination that had allowed her to survive personal tragedy at a young age now came to her aid. She traveled, she nourished friendships old and new, and, most important, she found the energy for more education and an active involvement in the Sacco and Vanzetti case. As her husband had advocated in FhW]cWj_ic, she used her ideas about truth and reality to try to change the world. While Alice remained in England winding up Henry’s affairs, Aleck formalized his engagement with Frederika Paine. Aleck and Frederika were alike in many ways: both had been abandoned by their parents for a [18.208.203.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:17 GMT) b_l_d]efj_ed )&time at a young age, both studied art, both were happy spirits. Even their spelling was alike. Aleck did not want to marry a woman like Billy’s wife, a wealthy, sickly woman with family encumbrances. He wanted someone who loved him, who supported his ambitions for art, who had no interest in the name “James.” He needed to break from Irving Street, where he had been a misfit. While he had adapted socially to the Cambridge and British Brahmins, their life was not the life for him. As a child and adolescent he had escaped the James stronghold whenever possible for the outdoors. He...