Companion to an Untold Story

The underlying, unifying principle of a life

243 The underlying, unifying principle of a life. Into his great seesaw letter of April 1995 Joel dropped, with pretended nonchalance , a paragraph about a moment of profound revelation: For honesty’s sake, and for the sake of adding a few words, I confess to having achieved a really significant selfanalytical breakthrough. I’ve been having some extraordinary dreams, unlike any I can recall, involving themes of evolution, self-identity, and death; but these have nothing to do with my new understanding. It came to me as I was tidying-up a drawer or two, which involved trying to put my photos into some kind of order. I was looking at these pictures, some of them from the Utah years, some from much earlier, and what you said when I mentioned I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing (I don’t remember what I was talking about, but it doesn’t matter) flashed into my mind and ignited a blazing insight: I was chasing women, you said. That was the key! I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait until we can get together, but I’ve got four or five photos that make it all clear. It’s a revelation at last to see the underlying, unifying principle of a life . . . mine, in particular. How can I have missed it for so long? No matter: what matters is that the deepest, most secret pits 244 of my psyche have been drained, and that’s one less thing to worry about anymore.102 He never showed us the photos that make it all clear, and I doubt he would ever have permitted entry to that sanctum of privacy. But his intent in April to show them, regardless of how seriously I take it, is evidence that he was still planning to live a while, whereas soon enough he was determined to die, and so destroyed these mementos and all the others (see World’s Fair). As a consequence, I do not know what the revelatory principle of his life was. He does not say that chasing women was the principle—though it may have been—only that Richard’s barb was the match that lit the blazing insight. It does not matter, in some sense, what the principle was. Were he to say to me, “This is the truth of my life,” I would not believe him. It is not that I would doubt his sincerity or self-awareness or deny the photographic data. It is that there can be no final truth of a life, for such a summary can be formulated only from a perspective that is not life’s, an unhuman retrospective on that which is finished. For what is life is a new hour, unprofaned by the past.103 Yet I admire the cold bravery of his self-assessment. It is not final, but it is very late, later than late autumn, late as the last slow chord of the orchestra that echoes away. “Nothing doesn’t worry me,” he says in the April letter.104 He means the nothing of the void. The nothing after the end. I do not like to be photographed . My efforts to form a natural smile in front of a lens produce unnatural results, with tensed teeth and tight 102 Letter, April 19, 1995. 103 “That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursing a descending and darkening way” (Thoreau, Walden, 1:141). 104 He wasn’t being ungrammatical or uncouth in this sentence. He might have written, for example, the more obviously proper “Nothingness doesn’t worry me.” However, a former philosophy major, he likely thought the word nothingness implies somethingness, as in Sartre. Joel wanted the idea of nothing. 245 wide eyes like a startled horse. I do best when someone else is sharing the camera’s attention, when the subject is the scene, the assembled family or friends or companions, and not myself alone, observed, scrutinized, examined, exposed. Joel was like me in his unease before the camera. We do not have many photos of him, only eight or ten or so: a young man sitting at a dinette with Richard in Sherman Oaks, a hirsute student on the couch in his Berkeley apartment, a visitor in our living room in...