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…