On Not Being Someone Else

Tales of Our Unled Lives

Andrew H. Miller

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780674271180, 9780674238084
• eBook ISBN: 9780674245181
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism

"To be someone—to be anyone—is about…not being someone else. Miller's amused and inspired book is utterly compelling."
—Adam Phillips

"A compendium of expressions of wonder over what might have been…Swept up in our real lives, we quickly forget about the unreal ones. Still, there will be moments when, for good or ill, we feel confronted by our unrealized possibilities."
—New Yorker

We live one life, formed by paths taken and untaken. Choosing a job, getting married, deciding on a place to live or whether to have children—every decision precludes another. But what if you'd gone the other way?

From Robert Frost to Sharon Olds, Virginia Woolf to Ian McEwan, Jane Hirshfield to Carl Dennis, storytellers of every stripe consider the roads not taken, the lives we haven't led. What is it that compels us to identify with fictional and poetic voices tantalizing us with the shadows of what might have been? Not only poets and novelists, but psychologists and philosophers have much to say on this question. Miller finds wisdom in all of these, revealing the beauty, the allure, and the danger of sustaining or confronting our unled lives.

"Miller is charming company, both humanly and intellectually. He is onto something: the theme of unled lives, and the fascinating idea that fiction intensifies the sense of provisionality that attends all lives. An extremely attractive book."
—James Wood

"An expertly curated tour of regret and envy in literature…Miller's insightful and moving book—both in his own discussion and in the tales he recounts—gently nudges us toward consolation."
—Wall Street Journal

"I wish I had written this book…Examining art's capacity to transfix, multiply, and compress, this book is itself a work of art."
—Times Higher Education

CHAPTER ONE

One Person, Two Roads

“The God Who Loves You”

All I could never be,

All, men ignored in me,

This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

—ROBERT BROWNING, “RABBI BEN EZRA”

Unled lives, I’m afraid, are a middle-aged affair. To have an unled life, you need to have a life first. And it’s when living a different life in the future seems unlikely that you’re most likely to recall the untraveled roads of your past. It was midway upon his life’s journey that John Cheever found himself pausing in a dark wood, the right road lost:

In middle age there is mystery, there is mystification. The most I can make out of this hour is a kind of loneliness. Even the beauty of the visible world seems to crumble, yes even love. I feel that there has been some miscarriage, some wrong turning, but I do not know when it took place and I have no hope of finding it.

Cheever came to his despair early: he was around thirty when he wrote this. For others, fifty seems to be about the time for these lonely mysteries. “You come to this place, mid-life,” writes Hilary Mantel. “You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted.” And it’s in James’s “The Diary of a Man of Fifty” that the narrator realizes that

there would always remain a certain element of regret; a certain sense of loss lurking in the sense of gain; a tendency to wonder, rather wishfully, what might have been.… Why, for instance, have I never married—why have I never been able to care for any woman as I cared for that one? Ah, why are the mountains blue and why is the sunshine warm? Happiness mitigated by impertinent conjectures—that’s about my ticket.

You come to this place, Mantel writes, and you don’t know how you got there; you pause, like James, and you ask your questions. “By the time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey,” writes Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities,

few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change anymore. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything’s having come about as it has. It might just as well have turned out differently.

It might have—but it hasn’t. And so here you are.

Our culture is famously, excitingly, tediously infatuated with youth, and has been for decades, thick with romantic comedies, young adult novels, bildungsromane.… It can seem that youth is the time of stories. But the stories of youth with which we are besotted are, typically, told by older people. They’re songs written by the middle-aged and sung as they eye the young. We look back, with whatever feelings, whatever thoughts, to the moment when choices were weighed and hazards risked, before the course of life was set. Neither the liquid choicelessness of childhood nor the frozen choicelessness of middle age, but a world of possibilities, various and new. When we were young, remarks a character in Woolf’s The Waves, “all simmered and shook; we could have been anything.” But now, “change is no longer possible. We are committed.… We have chosen now, or sometimes it seems the choice was made for us—a pair of tongs pinches us between the shoulders.”

The main figure in Carl Dennis’s poem “The God Who Loves You” is driving home from work; it’s a dull trip, but its routine emptiness gives him a chance to reflect. Here’s how the poem begins:

The God Who Loves You

It must be troubling for the god who loves you

To ponder how much happier you’d be today

Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.

It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings

Driving home from the office, content with your week—

Three fine houses sold to deserving families—

Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened

Had you gone to your second choice for college,

Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted

Whose ardent opinions on painting and music

Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.

A life thirty points above the life you’re living

On any scale of satisfaction. And every point

A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.

You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you

Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments

So she can save her empathy for the children.

And would you want this god to compare your wife

With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?

It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation

You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight

Than the conversation you’re used to.

And think how this loving god would feel

Knowing that the man next in line for your wife

Would have pleased her more than you ever will

Even on your best days, when you really try.

Can you sleep at night believing a god like that

Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives

You’re spared by ignorance?

“Have compassion for your guardian angel,” the speaker seems to say—as if this ordinary man stuck in his workday routine could ease the mind of a fretful god. It’s a sly bit of flattery. But we’re not supposed to think there really is a god anxiously pacing in his bedroom; these thoughts are the realtor’s thoughts, glorified. In being told to console this downcast divinity, then, the realtor is being told to console himself.

And you’re being told to console yourself, too. “It must be troubling for the god who loves you / To ponder how much happier you’d be today / Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.” Reading the poem’s opening lines, it’s natural to assume that you are being addressed—that “you” means you, and that you have an attentive god looking out for you. Another sly bit of flattery. When I was a child and had lost something in the house, a toy or coin, I would think, if there is a god, he knows where my marble rolled, my nickel fell. For a long time, this was the closest I came to god, to his knowledge and his silence. If I could only see from where he sees, or have that special sort of vision he has, I too would know. When I’m dead, I thought, I’ll be able to find all my lost things—as if heaven were a last reunion with the lost. As I grew older, I came to think that I could find my lost opportunities there as well. If your god is a loving god, it can be comforting to imagine his or her knowledge of you. In Dennis’s poem, the god is comforting in just this companionable way: he knows the realtor, knows what he’s done, and knows what he hasn’t done. “The death of God,” writes Adam Phillips, “is the death of someone knowing who we are.”

It’s only in reading the next long sentence that you realize that the poet is talking to someone else: a realtor who commutes home from the office on Friday evenings, who went to a particular college, had a particular roommate, and so on. But the trick has done its work: you’ve been drawn into the poem, invited to see yourself in this man, to participate in his story, even as you recognize your differences. Dennis asks you to reflect on a life which is and isn’t yours. Of course, this is what the realtor is doing, too, as he thinks about the life he hasn’t led, a life that is and isn’t his. And so the unled life that the realtor contemplates as he drives home and the fictional life that you contemplate as you read resonate gently together.

But why has the knowledge of the realtor’s lives been displaced onto a god? I’ll be claiming that unled lives are a largely modern preoccupation. You’d think, then, that all the gods would have absconded. Yet they appear regularly in these stories. In a poem titled “In the Terrible Night,” Fernando Pessoa describes a wretched man tormented in bed:

In the terrible night, natural substance of all nights,

In the night of insomnia, natural substance of all my nights,

I remember, awake in tossing drowsiness,

I remember what I’ve done and what I might have done in life.

I remember, and an anguish

Spreads all through me like a physical chill or a fear.

The irreparable of my past—this is the real corpse.

Trapped in his memories, he thinks,

what I was not, what I did not do, what I did not even dream;

What only now I see I ought to have done,

What only now I clearly see I ought to have been—

This is what is dead beyond all the Gods.

This—and it was, after all, the best of me—is what not even the Gods bring to life.

In Emily Dickinson’s “Remorse—Is Memory—Awake,” the speaker also looks back in the dark. What is remorse? she asks. It is “memory awake … Its past set down before the Soul / And lighted with a match / Perusal to facilitate / Of its condensed dispatch.”

Remorse is cureless—the Disease

Not even God—can heal—

For ‘tis His institution—and—

The Adequate of Hell.

And in the poem “Lost Days,” Dante Gabriel Rossetti sums up his life in a god’s company. “The lost days of my life until to-day, / What were they?” he asks.

I do not see them here; but after death

God knows I know the faces I shall see,

Each one a murdered self, with low last breath.

“I am thyself,—what hast thou done to me?”

“And I—and I—thyself,” (lo! each one saith,)

“And thou thyself to all eternity!”

These people look back with a bleak fervor: one sees what he ought to have been, another sees the past lit by a match flare, the third sees the faces of his victims. Before anything else, their poems are retrospective. What can they know about the past? How do they feel about it? And how is it connected to the present?

We’ve already seen the answer to this last question. In the stories we’ve been looking at, the past and present are connected by a road or track or path or stream down which we can see. This suggests that we can know the past with the immediacy and confidence we ordinarily have with visible things. But, of course, we can’t really look at the past, and often have little certainty about it. Sometimes it comes as a confused kaleidoscope of bright, broken colors; sometimes a black and white photograph; sometimes a smell; sometimes it comes as a wave of sourceless feeling running along your skin or through your heavy chest, sometimes it’s simply the smile on your face. Rarely do you see it cleanly backlit, as if down an empty road. This, then, is one reason that gods are on hand: they give you an implausible certainty about the life you’ve led and a more implausible certainty about the lives you haven’t.

And yet, there appears to have been an administrative error somewhere: these gods have been issued only half the standard complement of divine powers. They’re omniscient, but not omnipotent. Pessoa’s dead are dead beyond the gods, Dickinson’s god can’t heal remorse, and Rossetti’s god looks passively at his murdered selves. In their impotence and dubious wisdom, they’re figures, maybe a bit hyperbolic, for adulthood. In his novel A Girl in Winter, Phillip Larkin speaks of a break that comes in most lives, “when the past dropped away and the maturity it had enclosed for so long stood painfully upright.” After such a break, he writes, there is “knowledge but no additional strength.” The hamstrung divinities that preside over my unled lives dramatize this conflict between the knowledge I seem to have as I look at the past and the power I know I don’t have. They keep me company in my informed incapacity.

Dennis’s poem also suggests a more psychologically shrewd reason that I imagine pasts for myself. For when I say, if only I had done this or that, things would have been better for me, I can smuggle in, under cover of dark disappointment or darker self-castigation, the assumption that I could have known what to do. Buyer’s remorse, l’esprit d’escalier, the feeling I have after I see what others have ordered—“I should have had the duck!”—the whole range of second-guessing moves I make as I try to game my ordinary experience: routine self-criticism nurturing the belief that my life could have been perfect. Like Pessoa’s speaker, I believe that my unled life was “after all, the best of me.” Like Spencer Brydon, I’m vain about my neglected capacities. Failure is merely a falling off from my potential, and heaven a home for my best self. “All I could never be, / All, men ignored in me, / This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.”

---

In “The God Who Loves You” Dennis gives this abandoned paradise a name: college. For fortunate Americans, college organizes and institutionalizes the transition from the shapeless play of childhood to the in-box / out-box mechanics of cubicled adulthood: it’s a time from which possibiliti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Preface
• Introduction
• One: One Person, Two Roads
• Two: Tales of Our Adulthood
• Three: All the Difference
• Works Consulted
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Index