Jim included the following passage from The Wicked Pavilion (1954) by Dawn Powell in one of his letters to me:

Sloane, so it seemed to him now, had never had to make a decision before in his life. There were always two paths, and if you stood long enough at the crossroads, one of them proved impassable. There were always two women, but one of them wouldn’t have you or one of them kidnapped you. There were always two careers, but at the crucial moment one of them dropped out, something happened, somebody made an appointment, and there you were. For Dalzell Sloane, destiny had shaped itself only through his hesitation…There were people, and Dalzell was one of them, who were born café people, claustrophobes unable to endure a definite place or plan. The café was a sort of union station where they might loiter, missing trains and boats as they liked, postponing the final decision to go any place or do anything until there was no longer any need for decision. One came here because one couldn’t decide where to dine, whom to telephone, what to do…One might be lonely, frustrated, or heartbroken, but at least one wasn’t sewed up.

Jim was a passionate fan of Isaiah Berlin and of Michel Foucault, both of whom he had met personally on visits which they had made at various times to New York. He asked me to obtain a copy of Alexander Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts for him, because Isaiah Berlin claims somewhere that it is one of the great works of Russian literature. I found an edition without difficulty in a New York bookstore. Jim devoured it eagerly. However, it was the opening passage which he said eased what he called his “problem of self-representation”:

Who is entitled to write his reminiscences?

Everyone

Because no one is obliged to read them. In order to write one’s reminiscences it is not at all necessary to be a great man, nor a notorious criminal, nor a celebrated artist, nor a statesman—it is quite enough to be simply a human being, to have something to tell, and not merely the desire to tell it but at least have some little ability to do so.

Every life is interesting; if not the personality, then the environment, the country are interesting, the life itself is interesting. Man likes to enter into another existence, he likes to touch the subtlest fibres of another’s heart, and to listen to its beating…he compares, he checks it by his own, he seeks for himself confirmation, sympathy, justification…

Dante’s poem is called The Divine Comedy. Sacrilegious poet! He usurped the impassible sceptre of Godhead to assign his friend and foe to the eternal terraces of the paradiso and the inferno. Does not all writing, even if it aims at Gelassenheit—to let things be—arrogate such illegitimate authority?

Philosophy provides a humbler definition of comedy, which eludes the hubris of the medieval poet: “The comical as such implies an infinite light-heartedness and confidence felt by someone raised altogether above his own inner contradiction and not bitter or miserable in it at all; this is the bliss and ease of a man who, being sure of himself, can bear the frustrations of his aims and achievements.” This is Hegel’s version of the divine comedy. No human being possesses sureness of self: this can only mean being bounded and unbounded, selved and unselved, “sure” only of this untiring exercise. Then, this sureness of self, which is ready to be unsure, makes the laughter at the mismatch between aim and achievement comic, not cynical; holy, not demonic. This is not love of suffering, but the work, the power of love, which may curse, but abides. It is power to be able to attend, powerful or powerless; it is love to laugh bitterly, purgatively, purgatorially, and then to be quiet.